Despite an extremely far-flung premise and excursions into mystical territory, Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth without Youth carefully sidesteps many of its potential pitfalls. In lieu of the long, exhaustive and semi-intelligible mess that one might expect from the film’s premise, the picture instead feels relatively straightforward and easy to ascertain. Moreover, the top-drawer performances by lead Tim Roth and others make it generally painless (even pleasurable, for those of us open to a challenge) to sit through. The work fully evinces Coppola’s gifts as a visual storyteller, his prowess with actors, and his deft hand at establishing onscreen atmosphere - the qualities that have made him a legend in filmmaking circles.

The film suffers from a crippling flaw, though, that lies rooted in its narrative strategy. Most standard Hollywood narratives that deal with a “fantastic” premise are bound, by default, to a basic rule of screenwriting which states that the film’s overall logical fabric must be established in the first ten minutes. In those expository first ten minutes, a scriptwriter can set up any basic logical principles (no matter how bizarre) – from the main characters in the script talking out of their ears, to shifting the weather with a wave of their hands – and an audience will be predisposed to accept those “rules.” The film must then create depth and emotional resonance within the boundaries of the “logical sphere” that it sets up. Youth without Youth’s central folly is that it blissfully ignores, even poo-poohs, this notion. The picture tells of a 70-year-old linguistic researcher named Dominic Matei (Roth) whose electrocution by a lightning bolt, on the eve of the Second World War, both reverses his age by several decades and logarithmically expands his intellectual capacities. That alone would provide enough material for an intriguing fantasy-themed drama, but the film also works in such elements as telepathy, telekinesis, possession by a prehistoric Indian goddess, and time travel. And it continues adding these revelations 30 minutes, an hour, and even two hours into its run time. This is a narrative strategy that simply doesn’t work. Coppola probably believed that he was beginning with a central locus and courageously expanding the boundaries of the film’s logical scope; instead, it feels that a new, broader locus is constantly replacing the old – a regenerative process that forces viewers to constantly wipe clean the slate of their presuppositions about the world presented in this film. And (witness the critical reactions to this movie) that is something most viewers simply aren’t willing or prepared to do; it will be more likely to elicit guffaws and catcalls from the majority of audiences.

More problematically, the film (which Coppola adapted from a novella by Romanian author Mircea Eliade) is clearly striving for an allegorical plane, and for all of its commendable lucidity regarding the actual story that unfurls onscreen, its themes are anything but lucid – a very serious problem for an allegory. Most viewers will have little difficulty relaying what happens in the picture, but will run into massive roadblocks in determining what those events mean, aside from picking up on Coppola’s obvious Nietzschean themes of der Übermensch that broadly define the second half of the film.

Still, for all of its thematic inscrutability, Youth (as mentioned) is not dislikable, and many of the events that transpire onscreen are truly wild and fascinating. Coppola gives us astonishing scenes such as his female protagonist, Laura’s (Alexandra Maria Lara) nocturnal posturing on the floor of a seaside hotel room, as the goddess Shiva wracks her body with tumult and belts out prehistoric observations in Sanskrit. As Pauline Kael once quipped: “You don’t get scenes like this in every movie.”

Above and beyond all else, Youth without Youth demands to be seen thanks to a career defining performance by Hungarian actress Lara, who plays a dual role in this picture. She not only outacts veterans Roth and Bruno Ganz, but exhibits the old-school Hollywood feline magnetism of actresses such as Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. Lara is utterly astonishing – a classic screen goddess born into the wrong decade. When she is on camera, one cannot tear one’s eyes away, and whenever she is offscreen, the film begs for her return. Say what one will about Youth without Youth; at the very least, it provides ample evidence that Lara deserves to be Hollywood’s next major star. Beautiful, maddeningly sensual and dramatically overwhelming, she transcends the movie’s flaws and - by her very presence - asserts her right to greatness.