One-off directing efforts by well-known actors typically yield shapeless but well-performed movies, varying between mannered anti-pretension and unchecked indulgence. Still, the frequent disjunction between an actor and whatever his pet project turns out to be can tempt a fan’s curiosity. But “Slipstream,” which was written and directed by Sir Anthony Hopkins, is a tedious fractured-narrative freakout — you can imagine the star earnestly telling his wife over breakfast that he wants to “really mix things up” and “go experimental.”

Poor cousin to “Inland Empire” and “Adaptation,” this attempt at rendering an aging screenwriter’s addled mind and the clichéd surrealism of Hollywood is an Avid-by-the-numbers meltdown. Though not without the odd flash of cockeyed humor, the film’s only surprise is how all the jittery editing, apocalyptic camera-click cutaways, and meta-antics add up to something utterly conventional, hardly rising above the complexity of an ambitious trailer.

“Slipstream” lurches through successive Chinese box-style segments. Mr. Hopkins stars as out-to-lunch writer Felix Bonhoeffer, who grapples with apparent rifts in his reality as his screenplays begin coming to life. In the first part, Felix stares unmoved in a convertible at a road-rage gunman who stalks through a freeway traffic jam screaming, “We’ve lost the plot!” Later, Felix has a confused moment of clarity near a roadside bar, but we’re soon whisked to the Mojave Desert for what look like scenes from a ’90s indie thriller starring Christian Slater and Jeffrey Tambor as edgy gangsters menacing a diner.

You won’t be surprised (indeed, you might well demand) that the hoods and their captive patrons and kitchen staff turn out to be actors on a movie set in the Mojave Desert. Not only that, the production is comically mismanaged by a frantic, baby-toting director (Gavin Grazer) and a bug-eyed producer (John Turturro channeling past Coen brothers performances) who barks into a dangling microphone wire unattached to an actual cell phone.

Finally, we return to the domestic peace of Felix at home, until resentful characters from the film-within-the-film come calling while he’s taking out the trash. (One man with a gunshot hole ventilating his head complains of being killed off prematurely.) Felix’s companion, Gina, is played by Mr. Hopkins’s real-life wife, Stella Arroyave; the two exude a natural rapport, but Ms. Arroyave, who also co-produced, delivers her lines with the straight-ahead tone of someone ordering a meal.

The concerns of “Slipstream” feel dated, displaying a bewilderment at the shallowness and madness of Hollywood nuttiness that in many respects could belong in a late-’60s pastiche. While the frenzy of the editing scheme (including flashbacks to archival disaster footage) pushes just beyond most conventional thresholds, it is routine and programmatic enough not to induce any real disorientation. The age-old conceit that when a writer loses it, his fictions come bubbling up, remains mundane.

“Slipstream” might only work as a comedy (allegedly Mr. Hopkins’s intention), but the writing is flat, and an homage to the brunette-and-blonde duo of “Mulholland Dr.” only reminds you of David Lynch’s superior conflicted lunacy. The movie runs out of gas with the interminable diner scene, which crystallizes a sense of pointlessness about the whole endeavor that never fades. As cosmic joke or creative-unconscious caper, “Slipstream” wears out its curiosity value fast, then resorts to the oldest ending in the book.

Mr. Hopkins’s familiarly distracted air makes it hard to bash him for wanting to freak out on those far-out modernist vibes, though the movie has a whiff of ham not unlike the way the actor habitually titillates studio audiences with how he gets into the role of Hannibal Lecter. Although he has gathered a game cast and the services of the talented cinematographer Dante Spinotti (“L. A. Confidential,” “Heat”), Sir Anthony’s attempt to let it all hang out as a director rates below his recent performance in the hot-rodding-codger quest “The World’s Fastest Indian.”