Re-entering “Blue Velvet” a full two decades after its premiere, something about David Lynch becomes amazingly clear: He’s got a hell of a sense of humor. From the famous opening sequence (the camera, slowly panning over idyllic 1950s-style suburban byways, picket fences, and Douglas Sirk-red fire engines, comes to rest on a seizurestricken geriatric) to its equally ironic, uncomfortably cheery, and serene ending, the film is also a persistent hoot. The jolt of “Blue Velvet” is no longer the shock of the new (especially considering that Mr. Lynch has reimagined and recycled its tricks in later works like “Wild at Heart” and “Mulholland Drive”). Shining through 20 years later is the grim wit guiding Mr. Lynch’s macabre imagination, alleviating the deadening burden of his sometimes narcissistic artiness, keeping the movie as fresh and entertaining as it ever was.

Still, “Blue Velvet” suffers from problems that infect all of Mr. Lynch’s work. All of his movies situate their characters between a distinctly stylized real world and their individual perceptions of it; the films fall apart when Lynch uses the space between those worlds for pure fun and games and forgets to let the alternate realities comment on each other. This is especially problematic in “Blue Velvet,” whose dueling worlds are frustratingly disconnected from each other.

The main attraction of “Blue Velvet”- the gas-sucking,head-crushing, foul-mouthed lord of the movie’s netherworld, Dennis Hopper’s Frank – is also its main problem. The performance is legendary for a reason (Mr. Hopper chews scenery with animalistic, bloody purpose), but the character is too broadly drawn to serve as a real comment on the cliche-bound, emotionally repressed world he’s juxtaposed against. As a performance, Hopper’s Frank is a marvel, but as a representation of the burrowed emotional waste of an entire era, the character’s ill-defined and insufficient.

Of course, if Frank purely reflected and inverted the cliched suburban world he haunts, “Blue Velvet” might be a lot less fun. Mr. Lynch is the unusual director whose “best” work – his most contained, precise, and controlled movies (“The Elephant Man,” “The Straight Story”) – is also his least interesting. For all its faults, “Blue Velvet” reveals now what it did then: Art houses, shockingly, aren’t only temples of earnestness.They can make for fantastically carnal fun houses as well.