For that you can thank Spike Jonze, the wizardly young video director, who has a silent-movie comic's gift for imagining the absurd in prosaic terms. (He made the amazing Fatboy Slim video in which the world's most hapless dance troupe traumatizes some real-life onlookers.) He's ideally suited to Being John Malkovich, a one-of-a-kind, inexplicably hilarious comedy about obsession, celebrity, and the nature of identity.

At one level, Being John Malkovich is the story of a triangle involving puppeteer Cusack, his frumpy wife (an unrecognizable Cameron Diaz), and his malicious dream girl, played with venomous relish by Catherine Keener. Basically, though, it's a slamming-doors farce--only the slamming doors all lead directly into the brain of actor John Malkovich.

Since a genuinely novel movie idea comes along about as often as Kahoutek, that's all you should know about the plot--except that it keeps topping its screwball conceits. Underlying Charlie Kaufman's ingenious script are a number of surprisingly resonant riffs, from celebrities as fantasy vessels to the appeal of virtual reality as an all-purpose painkiller. Only when the movie's over do you notice how neatly the script has set up puppeteering as a metaphor for obsession, and how slyly it keeps extending that metaphor. And if that doesn't convince you to buy a ticket, hey--did I mention Orson Bean?