To be directly in the mindset of these guys isn't exactly a pleasant experience; if we take their ironic self-loathing as evidence, it seems even they don't want to be there. But like everybody else, these guys have a right to see their life experience mirrored in art. The problem with Chasing Amy is that Smith has decided to describe the experience of young women as well, and they are a group he seems to neither respect nor like.

Chasing Amy is the story of Holden McNeil (Ben Affleck), a predictably Salinger-esque outsider who falls hard for Alyssa Jones (Joey Lauren Adams), a sweet but sharp-tongued comic book artist. She's also a lesbian, a fact Smith uses as a cute little obstacle to their love, which of course prevails. To give him a tiny bit of credit, Smith (who wrote the screenplay) does make an effort to justify Alyssa's switch as something more glorious than the straight male fantasy that all a lesbian needs to set her straight is, in the words of the film, "a hard dick." But no snappy dialogue can overcome the lack of respect with which Smith treats the character of Alyssa.

Joey Lauren Adams is delightful as Jones; the character could easily become over-earnest or cloying, but Adams, with her little helium voice, manages to make Alyssa seem like a real person. She's strong willed and knows who she is, except for one little thing--her sexuality. Yeah, right.

After Alyssa and Holden hook up, things get even weirder. There's a strange, obsessive quality to this film. The characters do a lot of talking about their relationships; in fact, most of the film consists of different characters talking about the relationship between Holden and Alyssa. It's like being stuck in an unending conversation about an affair gone bad, or someone's drug problem, or someone's troubles at work: It's never as interesting to the person listening as it is to the person with the problem. I get the feeling Smith is rehashing parts of his life for us on screen, and that he's fascinated with himself. The film certainly has the feel of being autobiographical; Smith himself is a comic-book fan (he sold his collection to finance Clerks), and Adams is his real-life girlfriend.

One obsession that Smith takes an opportunity to air is his deep distrust of women's sexuality. Though Holden has no problem with Alyssa's lesbianism (in fact it seems to fascinate him), he becomes disgusted when he finds out she's had sex with other men. For me, this is when an annoying movie really became insufferable. Holden, who's never very appealing to begin with, becomes a wholly loathsome character at this point. It's clear he has a black-and-white template in his head: Women are either angels or whores, and Alyssa, whom he'd previously considered a virgin because she hadn't had sex with a man, plunges way down in his esteem.

It could have been possible for Smith to tell this story without being so offensive. He's clearly on dangerous ground, in terms of political correctness, but sometimes pushing those kinds of boundaries can be the stuff of good drama. But rather than investigating a dangerous realm, Chasing Amy just lays there. The characters endlessly present different, cogent points of view on the meaning of Holden and Alyssa's romance, but the ideas are undigested. It is as if Smith were still trying to figure all this out, while ignoring the essential misogyny at the core of the story, which tells us that Alyssa's sexuality is something to be considered, worried about and judged--it's the subject of a whole movie--while Holden's simply is. The sheer volume of attention lavished on Alyssa's sexuality in itself reeks of anxiety.

Of course, none of this is anything new. There are plenty of movies steeped in the anxiety provoked by women's sexuality--Hitchcock comes to mind. But at least Hitchcock had the grace to be entertaining.