In 1991, I came across cartoonist Daniel Clowes’s hilariously accurate short comic strip “Art School Confidential,” an undercover expose of everything wrong with art school – what Mr. Clowes (BFA Pratt Institute 1984) only half-sarcastically refers to as “the biggest scam of the century!” In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I went to art school and studied art in graduate school (which, though actually a university, was more like an art school within a real school), and I taught at art school for 13 years.

The comic strip “Art School Confidential” examines the low end of the art school spectrum – the “types” of students, professors, assignments, critiques, artworks, dreams, and dissolutions encountered in what are probably some of the worst courses being taught under the guise of higher education. It has since been expanded into a screenplay by Mr. Clowes, who also wrote “Ghost World,” both of which were directed by Terry Zwigoff. A few of the comic strip’s characters and situations are nodded to in the film, but most of the wit, truth, irony, range, and surprise in the original are absent.

The film teeters between slapstick, thriller, farce, angry parody, and creepy, fictional documentary. There are flashes of truth: character types, all of which are thinly drawn; art world in-jokes and politics, many of which feel dated, as if we were watching a 1980s period film, and the seemingly gay, clueless Professor Sandiford (John Malkovich), who has nothing to teach and who, with his hand on a student’s knee, tells him, “At your age, it’s essential that you learn to experiment with all different kinds of art and philosophies and lifestyles.” But mostly the film, which admittedly is at times very funny, offers nothing more than a series of one-liners, cliches, and vignettes that never quite come together.

One of the reasons the film is a letdown is because often, in the comic strip, Mr. Clowes gets the details exactly right. We meet “self-obsessed neurotic art-girls who make their own clothes,” “Mr. Phantasy … he does a Frazetta-style painting of a Barbarian as the solution to every assignment,” “Mom … completely talentless, rich housewife with too much time on her hands,” and “everybody’s most dreaded model combo – the hideous, hirsute hippie girl and her freakish, poodle haired boyfriend.” Here, we also find the “desperate fellow [who] tried to pass off his trashed dorm room as a final project,” and the professor “who went for it: ‘As an expression of frustration this is not wholly invalid.'”

The fictional Strathmore Institute, set in a garbage-ridden New York, becomes merely a backdrop for what is basically a strangler thriller/love story, in which both plot lines, neither developed nor explored, clash with each other.The film’s “hero,” freshman painting major and virgin Jerome Platz (Max Minghella) begins the semester as a diligent, self-involved artist committed to his formless illustrations, looking to get laid, and to become “the next Picasso.” Soon, rather curiously, he will stop at nothing to become a famous art star, which he hopes will win him the heart of beautiful art model Audrey (Sophia Myles), with whom he has absolutely no chemistry.

Audrey is just a fickle, pretty face. Jerome, though cute, is totally ineffectual and unappealing as a character.He is spineless, dishonest, and whiney. When his artwork – horribly illustrative and sentimental pictures of Audrey – does not win her affections, he adopts another student’s equally trite style. When that does not work, he basically steals and passes off another artist’s bad work as his own – an outof-character act that ends tragically, without any remorse on his part or any humor for the audience. By then – mid-way through the film – I didn’t even want Jerome to get the girl.I wanted to see his neck wrung by the Strathmore Strangler.

Jim Broadbent is extremely convincing as the disgruntled, middle aged, alcoholic artist/sage – a no B.S. alum of Strathmore. Jerome’s roommate, film student Vince (Ethan Suplee), is just crazy enough to be taken seriously – a burst of welcome energy. And I will watch any movie in which I can see John Malkovich, Steve Buscemi, or Angelica Huston, but not even the combined weirdness and talents of these three unique artists can hold together, let alone rescue, “Art School Confidential.”