As the director of the 2001 cult hit “Donnie Darko,” Richard Kelly gets his share of fan-boy adulation. But for many moviegoers, it was the uncanny timing of his debut that lodged it in the mind. The film, which opened barely a month after the attacks of September 11, 2001, is about psychosis, prophecy, and time travel, and featured an airplane engine crashing into a suburban house. “Donnie Darko” had been completed long before the attacks (it premiered at Sundance in January of that year), but that only made the resonance more eerie.

One hopes Mr. Kelly’s powers of prognostication will not extend to his follow-up, “Southland Tales,” which opens next Wednesday. In his sprawling apocalyptic satire, Mr. Kelly imagines a celebrity-besotted, comic-book America after another terrorist attack, this time a nuclear explosion in the heart of Texas. Amid the pitched intrigues of a 2008 election and surveillance by a “Scanner Darkly”-style government program, a porn actress (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and her movie-star husband (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) peddle a prescient doomsday screenplay. Split identities proliferate among the characters, neo-Marxists conspire, and German pseudoscientists who resemble extras from “Dune” hawk a tide-based energy source.

Yet, oddly, Mr. Kelly conceived much of this zeitgeist movie, too, prior to September 11, 2001.

“We got back from Sundance with ‘Donnie Darko’ and we were depressed,” the writer-director recalled. “I decided to write a big L.A.comedy about a bunch of eccentric L.A. characters: out-of-work actors, movie stars, cops, twin brothers, a big blimp — and have it end in rioting and madness.”

Catalyzed by the terrorist attacks, the picaresque idea began to coalesce around more sobering anxieties and realities, but retained the comic catharsis. Mr. Kelly, a huge fan of “Saturday Night Live,” pointedly casts several graduates of the show, with Amy Poehler, Nora Dunn, and Cheri Oteri as rebel radicals bent on sabotaging the conservative presidential ticket.

“I thought if I’m going to make a film this dark and doomsday-oriented — nuclear Armageddon, global warming, a fierce election battle, very medicinal stuff — let’s make it as fun and entertaining as possible,” Mr. Kelly said.

But while the filmmaker emphasizes the comedy in “Southland Tales,” the truth is that the dark, schizophrenic spirit of “Donnie Darko” haunts this landscape, too. Mr. Kelly’s Los Angeles-centered concept recalls the other 2001 release that seemed attuned to the culture’s fragmented, traumatized psyche: David Lynch’s Hollywood nightmare “Mulholland Dr.” As the unnerving, enveloping atmosphere of “Donnie Darko” attests, its 32-year-old creator owes a great deal to Mr. Lynch. But he also sees something in him others do not.

“I think he makes science fiction,” Mr. Kelly said of the iconic director. “He might disagree with me, but I think the language, the design, the metaphysics of his films feel rooted in science fiction, in multiple dimensions. And I think he pioneered a language of cinema. I worship the guy, obviously.”

For naysayers, Mr. Kelly’s science-fiction bent is yet one more excuse to pan the film as a fantastical mess. “Southland Tales” is catnip for critical clichés about flops and follies, much like Larry Charles’s 2003 stab at apocalyptica, “Masked and Anonymous.” Genres are mingled, a two-hour-plus narrative is mangled, and pop personalities are flamboyantly cast in roles: Justin Timberlake plays a scarred veteran of the Iraq War who does a music-video number; “American Pie” alumnus Seann William Scott is a tormented cop, and Mr. Johnson is a Rock-like star named Boxer Santaros. Mr. Kelly even one-ups his use of Patrick Swayze in “Donnie Darko” with a flashback cast of 1980s-associated faces, including Curtis Armstrong (aka Booger from “Revenge of the Nerds”), Wallace Shawn, and John Larroquette.

So where Mr. Kelly sees “an arch-comedic eccentricity counterbalanced by a moody emotional undercurrent,” fickle audiences at last year’s premiere in Cannes saw a chance for self-righteous walkouts and boos. “But we got nominated for the Palme d’Or,” Mr. Kelly points out. “So you take the punches to the face like a man, and take your lemons and make lemonade.” Doubtless sweetening the experience was the subsequent deal with Sony Pictures, which ponied up $1 million for further special effects and a final, shorter cut.

The staggered production history seems to reflect a long view (and a stamina) in Mr. Kelly, who saw “Donnie Darko” successfully re-released in theaters in its original director’s cut. While he extols the present form of “Southland Tales,” he talks freely of wanting to restore 10 to 15 minutes on the DVD. “Maybe less. We’ll see how it marinates,” the director said. Although shooting DVD padding is now routine in the industry, Mr. Kelly’s sentiment seems to extend the creative process to a wait-and-see attitude about his film’s reception.

Such plans, as well as the comicbook prequels that Mr. Kelly is releasing, may strike some as the sign of a director buying into his own cult. But the young filmmaker, though nothing if not ambitious in his vision, retains a sense of freewheeling humor about his film and his influences.

“I think it’s the sequel to ‘Kiss Me Deadly,'” he said, referring to Robert Aldrich’s 1955 adaptation of Mickey Spillane’s hard-boiled Mike Hammer story. “The spirit of Ralph Meeker [who played Hammer] has invaded Dwayne Johnson, and he’s become schizophrenic. I would love if it played on a double bill with ‘Kiss Me Deadly.'”