“Sin City” is what you’d get if you downloaded every film noir into the mind of a cyborg lizard, impaled it on a stack of pornography, and translated its agonized brainwaves into a movie. Hypnotic and repellent, it’s a tour de force of raw adolescent urges. Every sick, sexed-up impulse in the pulp universe finds a home in “Sin City,” every bad vibe comes here to brood – and to rape, dismember, and kill.

Half film, half cartoon, “Sin City” has been adapted with slavish fidelity from the ultra-graphic graphic novels of Frank Miller, the seminal comic book creator whose bleak psychological take on Batman (“The Dark Knight Returns”) spawned the contemporary vogue for angsty superhero revisionism. The “Sin City” books distill every hard-boiled cliche into striking calligraphic noir. Inked in deep black gashes, angry jags of white, and gouges of severed-limb red, they’re arty adolescent fever dreams, splendidly austere and fiercely expressionistic.

Sin City itself is a shadow maze of brick, broken glass, and an infinite array of Venetian blinds. Every man has a square jaw, an itchy trigger finger, and simmering psychotic rage; every dame packs heat and huge cleavage. Teeth exist to be bared or broken. Revenge is a civic duty. It is always raining – blood as often as water.

With help from the effects team of “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow,” co-director Robert Rodriguez has retained every squint and sneer of the book; this is the most literal-minded adaptation since Gus Van Sant’s shot-by-shot remake of “Psycho.” The result plays like some impossibly high-end rear-projection drenched in black light, convulsed in bold silhouettes and jackknifing vertigo perspectives. For better or worse, Mr. Miller’s words have also come over intact. Tough guy interior monologues clutter up the soundtrack, flat as a set of word bubbles.

The story is told in three interrelated chapters of decreasing intensity. Bruce Willis stars as Hartigan, a good cop with a “bad ticker” and a gnarly glowin-the-dark scar slashed across his forehead. In the prelude that serves to acclimate the audience to the picture’s disorienting style, Hartigan tries to rescue a young girl from the clutches of Roarke (Nick Stahl), an aristocratic child rapist. Double-crossed by his partner Bob (the inevitable, one-note Michael Madsen), Hartigan saves the girl but goes down dribbling fluorescent blood.

The first story tracks the gigantic, grief-stricken Marv (Mickey Rourke) as he seeks to avenge the death of a beloved prostitute. (She has a heart of gold and is named, naturally enough, Goldie). Seething with reptilian rage, and unrecognizable under his blockhead prosthetics, Mr. Rourke makes an awfully good case for a comeback. His savage characterization encapsulates the “Sin City” ethos: Delight in the “pure hateful bloodthirsty joy of the slaughter.”

After murdering a dozen Sin City folk in search of answers (including a dirty priest played by Mr. Miller), Marv heads for a snarling showdown with a bizarre serial killer known as … Kevin (Elijah Wood). Dressed in a Charlie Brown sweater, mirrored Lennon specs, and high-top Chuck Taylors, Kevin’s a nerd chic cannibal with superhuman dexterity, retractable finger-talons, and an insatiable hunger for ladies of the night. In a gruesome gag, he mounts their heads on the wall like hunting trophies.)

I’m going to spoil the spectacle a little, but you really ought to know what you’re getting into. Once Marv wrangles the jackrabbit fiend with some clever handcuff maneuvering, he chops off his arms and legs, ties up the bloody stumps with rubber tubing, and feeds him to a salivating wolf. In silhouette, we witness the feeding, and are told that Kevin withstood his death with a Mona Lisa smile on his face. Truth be told, the “pure hateful bloodthirsty joy of the slaughter” is something of an understatement.

In the second narrative, a taciturn cipher named Dwight (Clive Owen) teams up with the hooker-guardians of Old Town to prevent the outbreak of a gang war. They are led by the Uzi-wielding Gail, dominatrix supreme and Dwight’s ex-lover, played by Rosario Dawson in 10-inch stilettos and a fishnet body-wrap. Devon Aoki memorably co-stars as Miho, a vaguely Asiatic samurai babe with a handful of swastika-shaped ninja stars and a knack for disembowelment.

Partially staged in La Brea-like tar pits, complete with giant plaster T-Rex’s and gurgling pools of muck, this central story is even more of a horny fan-boy fantasy than the first. It also perpetuates a bogus line of “moral” questioning. The antiheroes of “Sin City” more than once defend their actions as directed only at those “deserving” it. Marv worries about his sanity; Dwight frets about the possible necessity of killing an innocent cop.

Whatever lip service is paid to such concerns, nothing in the end prevents their doling out the hyper-violence. This token moral dimension reminds me of the “feminist” defense of Linda Lovelace presented in the recent “Inside Deep Throat”: that by endlessly indulging in the eponymous sex-act, she was really empowering her frustrated womanhood and whatnot. Please. “Sin City” is about as convincingly moral as “Deep Throat” is consciously political.

As the concluding chapter makes clear, the massacre is the message. We pick up where the prologue left off, with Hartigan improbably hanging on in an intensive care ward. Framed for the horrific crimes of Roarke, Hartigan is thrown in the clinker, his only lifeline the weekly letters he gets from little Nancy Callahan (Jessica Alba), the girl he saved.

Eventually, Hartigan tracks her down in a strip club; all good girls in Sin City up to be angelic hookers. Nancy barely has time to mash her goods on Hartigan before they’re hounded by the Yellow Bastard, a mysterious, gnomish man with mustard-colored flesh and rancid breath. His revolting agenda, and a final act of “heroism” bring “Sin City” to its ugly, operatic finale.

The movie fades to the coldest, bleakest black. This is a spectacular but soulless affair, an unrelenting virtuoso death-trip with no larger message, no relief, and no catharsis. It aims to wow, and there’s no doubt it triumphs on some basic, base level. The synthetic images sear the eyes and the downward-spiraling nihilism clutches in the gut. But when its over, and the hair on your neck has settled back down, and the essential hollowness of the experience takes over, you’ll know what you’ve just seen, and its familiar enough: two vile and vivid hours of blockbuster pornography.