Has David Lynch jumped the shark? Even audiences accustomed to the director’s patented deadpan hoodoo may find “Inland Empire,” which has its American premiere Sunday at the New York Film Festival, too much of a vertiginous in-joke — and one lacking any decipherable punch line.

The film may (or may not) track an epic meltdown, as Nikki, an actress played by Laura Dern, spends much if its three hours in a blur of multiple personalities, trapped in a hypnogogic state that loops around itself like the scratchy LP that fills the screen as the movie opens, a giant stylus riding a dusty groove.

There is a story, of sorts: Nikki, whose career could use a jump-start, has been cast in a new movie, an overbaked romance in the style of Tennessee Williams called “On High in Blue Tomorrows.” She’s cast opposite Devon (Justin Theroux), a notorious womanizer a decade younger than herself, who is repeatedly warned to keep his pants on around his co-star. Nikki’s control freak of a Polish husband is viciously jealous. And to tweak the suspense, the film’s pompous director (Jeremy Irons), explains that the project is actually a remake. The original 1940s version, supposedly based on a Polish gypsy folktale, was aborted when both stars were murdered. As scenes unfold, that story of tragic infidelity appears to spark an affair between Nikki and Devon, whose fictional alter egos — Sue and Billy — speak in the aristocratic drawls of the plantation South.

So far, we’re on fairly stable ground. Mr. Lynch is working another variation on the noirish Hollywood theme most recently explored in his 2001 “Mulholland Drive.” The characterizations are all slightly outsized and humorously skewed. That great old hangdog Harry Dean Stanton materializes as a sidekick to Mr. Irons’s self-congratulatory Kingsley, ceaseless in his efforts to cadge a few bucks off everyone on the set, a sly factotum who laments, “I used to carry my own weight.”

To creep us out, there is Nikki’s framing encounter with a mysterious woman (Grace Zabriskie, nearly upstaged by her baroque hair styling), who drops by her mansion one morning. This stranger speaks in a halting, heavy Middle European accent and warns of a debt that must be repaid, and of an old Polish legend about evil, and reflected images that take fleshly form. Perhaps that explains the stalker that the actors overhear at rehearsal one day, the one who vanishes without a clue.

After the hour or so that it takes to establish this, the movie dispatches Nikki into the Lynchian funhouse. To describe in much detail what happens might spoil the process of surprise and disorientation that is the film’s chief pleasure, yet it is also rather difficult to parse those details to adequate purpose.

The easiest thing to say is several parallel realities begin to converge in Nikki’s head: the adulterous saga of the movie she’s shooting; a grim, chilly Polish scenario that involves the smuggling of prostitutes; the gory monologue of a white-trash Nikki who finally stumbles down Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, dripping blood over the stars embedded in the concrete; an art-deco apartment populated by a Greek chorus of spunky streetwalkers, who deliver a dance routine to Little Eva’s “The Locomotion”; another apartment where three people wearing giant rabbit heads enact a dry situation comedy; and a dim hotel room, where a pretty, dark-haired woman sits alone, crying as she watches everything transpire on a TV with fuzzy reception.

Though engineered, as one of Ms. Dern’s characters exclaims in more colorful vernacular, to lay a head-trip on the viewer, these overlapping fragments pile up with a hypnotic resonance as the brain stops racing to make connections and finally succumbs to the drift.

The use of Krzysztof Penderecki’s dire chamber music in the Polish sequences, and Mr. Lynch’s own ambient industrial rumblings throughout, sustains an aura of the uncanny that has been the director’s signature since “Eraserhead” first flummoxed midnight moviegoers 30 years ago.

The director, who shot “Inland Empire” in fits and starts over several years using a $3,000 “prosumer” Sony digital video camera, has said he pieced the work together from many unrelated scraps — including videos produced for subscribers to his Web site, www.davidlynch.com, the source of those talking rabbits and the curious letters “Axxon N” on a door in a studio backlot — making it up as he went along and giving the actors only what they needed for each scene. There’s a sense that the ease of working this way liberated Mr. Lynch to make the most uncompromised work of his career. So much so that the film would not be misplaced on the festival’s avant-garde sidebar, perhaps paired with Kenneth Anger’s “Scorpio Rising” (with which Mr. Lynch’s films share a love of reappropriated 1960s pop and psycho-sexual imagery) or a Maya Deren retrospective (even more so than 1997’s “Lost Highway,” the director’s latest cops its Mobius Strip effect of doubling and death from the landmark “Meshes of an Afternoon”).

Besides the raw and grainy video, the unifying element is Ms. Dern, who co-produced, and is consistently willing to submit herself to the grotesque distortions of the director’s vision. Mr. Lynch revels in the mobility of his video camera to create nightmarish facial close-ups that evoke those of German expressionist horror films and their nocturnal void of splintered psyches. It’s also as if Mr. Lynch took that awful, car wreck of a moment from “Blue Velvet” — the one in which Ms. Dern’s blonde ingénue learns a horrible truth, and her lips slowly tremble and erode back into her mouth — and made something operatic out of it.

What does it all mean? Not even Mr. Lynch claims to know. Such ambiguities, which challenge accepted ways of seeing, may confound. But few filmmakers have imagined anything as rich and redeemingly strange.