The scene of violence that ensues should have James Toback clinking a glass in celebration in the mirror: he managed to top the Jim Brown/Tisa Farrow head-smashing sequence in FINGERS. The great man himself appears here as well, as a gay artist who comes on to Mike Tyson (playing himself) at a party. Bijou Phillips is a wonder as the wigga-talkin' Upper East Side chiclet who proclaims, 'I wanna be black-I'm a kid in America.' Ben Stiller, as a tormented dirty cop, gives the performance of his life in a high-speed monologue of self-analysis that's like a speed freak's channeling the essence of Robert Downey, Jr.

Toback keeps cranking up the heat as the cast-a conceptual-art demonstration of stunt casting-leaves the audience openmouthed. It resembles one of Godard's mid-sixties essay-movies like MASCULINE FEMININE or TWO OR THREE THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER, but with race substituted for sexual politics, and with a heavy dose of pornography and melodramatic pulp. This movie about the uneasy millennium-era relationship of black and white people in America is not, as many people have said, a work of moony White Negroism.

It's the one Tobackonists have been waiting for since the thrill of his debut movie FINGERS-a movie with the soar and rush of obsession that also has the sanity and craft of a grown man.