By design and by failure of design, “Yes” dares you to say no. Written and directed by the eccentric British filmmaker Sally Potter (“Orlando,” “The Tango Lesson”), the movie is pretentious, didactic, reductive, schematic, and occasionally very silly. Yet it can also be beautiful, clever, compelling, and moving. There are formal delights and structural bungles; superb acting and simple-minded speechifying; disarming sincerity and grating naivete. It is, in short, a mixed-up movie about our mixed-up world.

Ms. Potter flaunts artifice and fumes liberalism. In the first scene, a helium-voiced cleaning lady (Shirley Henderson) discourses on the political-poetic implications of ruling-class dirt. The last scene reconciles our contemporary clash of civilizations in the communist utopia of Cuba. Between these blunt bookends runs not a movie but a “text” – one written, moreover, entirely in iambic pentameter.

Yes: iambic pentameter. Yes: the communist utopia of Cuba. No: I’m not kidding, and neither is Ms Potter, although “Yes” isn’t without a wry sense of humor.

Joan Allen stars as the allegorical construct “She.” Born in Belfast but raised in America, She lives in London, practices molecular biology, and is joylessly married to Anthony (Sam Neill), who you may think of as the Emotionally Detached Bourgeois White Man. These two are so extravagantly estranged that a bitter argument erupts over the question, “how are you?” She also has an adolescent goddaughter (Stephanie Leonidas), who is oppressed by Western Beauty Standards.

At a fancy dinner party, under the watchful eye of a video surveillance camera, She meets “He” (Simon Abkarian), a smoldering Lebanese exile. Formerly a noble surgeon, He is now a lowly chef, but his true occupation is Portentous Porter of Geopolitical Baggage. She and He begin to make love – not war!

One day, He is subjected to the xenophobic rant of a young punk dishwasher, and spat upon. Up until now, dignified He has retained his composure in the sneering face of Western Superiority, but this is too much! Well, no: Ms. Potter prefers the polemical to the plausible. The confrontation sparks juvenile jihad in his heart, and He abandons the imperialist, arrogant, self-serving She.

Back to Beirut He goes, to pose amidst piles of rubble. Meanwhile, despondent She hurries to the deathbed of her beloved aunt (Sheila Hancock), an unabashed socialist whose fraught final utterance is a single magic word: “Cuba.”

As an impassioned partisan of anti-realist devices, I say yes, in principle, to Ms. Potter’s rhyming screenplay. At worst, the trope encourages pontification and imposes artificial obligations on the already overwrought material. At best – and much of it is unexpectedly good – the linguistic schemata creates suspense and arranges for witty conversational denouements. Iambic pentameter sets the talk in a specifically Western cultural tradition; by having Him speak it, Ms. Potter makes a much subtler point about cultural displacement and anxiety than His pedantic rant about English as oppressive lingua franca.

But as someone with ideological sympathy for Ms. Potter’s point of view, I still say no to the unedifying politics of “Yes.” The Cuba shtick is appallingly disingenuous. Mr. Neill plays nothing but a cliched straw man (though, to his credit, he plays it well). She and He devolve from characters into stock figures. And the special emphasis on working-class figures in the background signals – what, exactly? Only, apparently, that they exist. “Batman Begins” says as much about the help, and more of lasting interest. “Yes” smacks of self-congratulation.

Despite all this surface formalism and polemical abstraction, there are fine moments when an intelligible dramatic vitality surges past these strictures, rendering them invisible. The dying aunt’s magnificent interior monologue blazes into the movie as if liberated from a suppressed masterpiece. Ms. Allen and Mr. Abkarian give strong, sympathetic performances in nearly every scene. Their commitment and concentration focus many a fuzzy scene with a conviction absent from the larger conception.

***

In the aftermath of the Rodney King riots, a man named Tommy Johnson decked himself out in facepaint and silly pants, and began performing a spastic form of hip-hop dance at birthday parties. Tommy the Clown soon became a “ghetto celebrity,” attracting a tribe of eager young disciples from his South Central Los Angeles neighborhood. Local gangs left the “clowns” alone, and “clowning” became a viable social identity in a place with few options.

A rival faction soon broke off to practice “krumping,” a convulsive, hyper-fast mutation of the clowning style that resembles some unholy melange of break-dance, kung fu, booty-shake, and epileptic seizure. The fiercely competitive clowns and krumps meet each year for a showdown in a local stadium. Highlights include the fatboy battle and virtuoso 4-year-olds doing the “stripper dance.”

“Rize” is a rousing documentary expose of the clown/krump subculture by David LaChapelle, a fashion photographer renowned for his super-synthetic Pop gloss, is a sensational dance film. A rich white interloper poking around disenfranchised black street culture, Mr. LaChapelle wisely keeps things simple, restricting his style to rough-and-ready digital video, with no fancy graphics or flashy montage. He lets the krump bring the funk.

And that it does. “Rize” is a sensation dance film. Ignore the facile self empowerment narrative; marvel at the crazy kinesis.