When Harmony Korine made “Gummo” a decade ago, the critics savaged him. One of New York’s most influential reviewers called it the worst film of 1997. On the other hand, when the German director Werner Herzog watched the scene in which a piece of bacon is taped to a wall above a bathtub, he pronounced Mr. Korine, a sometime skateboarder, screenwriter, and club kid, a genius. Only 24 at the time, the fledgling auteur had immediately cornered the market on polarizing gonzo weirdness.

But he was as original as he was provocative, and if the Tilt-a-Whirl narratives made about as much sense as that oddly placed strip of pork, they nevertheless compelled a perverse fascination — deepened by the filmmaker’s knack for striking visual compositions that often seemed as random as a spring tornado.

Off the scene for the past eight years, Mr. Korine is back with “Mister Lonely,” which makes its general-release premiere today at IFC Center after playing at the Tribeca Film Festival. He hasn’t lost his touch.

The film opens with an arresting bit of footage. As Bobby Vinton’s sugared, sad-sack title song plays, a Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna), gussied up in full regalia with a yellow helmet and surgical mask, pedals a stunt bike around a go-kart track. A toy monkey trails behind, flapping angel wings underneath the tassel of a fez. Everything plays in slow motion, the playground colors bold against the blue landscape, everything made washier by the grainy film stock. It’s a beautiful moment. And there are plenty more to come: nuns falling through the skies above the Panamanian jungle; a chorus of hand-painted eggs singing Iris DeMent’s “My Life,” and Mr. Luna, accompanying himself with breathy, self-conscious bursts of “sha-zah!” practicing his King of Pop dance steps on the shores of a lake in the Scottish Highlands.

None of this ever really adds up to a movie, even though the premise — the star-crossed affair between Mr. Luna’s Jackson and a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton) who meet at a gig at an old folks’ home in Paris and return to an impersonators’ commune in Scotland — sounds ideal. Offbeat? Sure. But not as strange as, say, your average Charlie Kaufman screenplay. It’s too bad, because for once Mr. Korine has given audiences the sense that he was

trying to create something that might play before midnight. It’s the first time he’s worked with a real budget and a full cast of professional actors — in place of character actors he normally assembles like found objects — and enjoyed the luxury of expansive natural locations in four countries.

There are no Michael Jackson songs featured on the soundtrack (which is mostly atmospheric stuff composed by Spiritualized’s J. Spaceman and the Sun City Girls). Still, through Mr. Luna’s ethereality, the movie evokes the melancholy optimism people once associated with the pop star, and how it translates to people who still want to find that magic somewhere.

The once-prankish Mr. Korine, trying to mature gracefully, apparently wants us to think of him in the same light.