Stew, the eye of the freewheeling sonic hurricane that is “Passing Strange,” spends much of this strange and satisfying musical knocking various chips off his own shoulder and replacing them with new ones.

An unclassifiable raconteur with a salt-and-pepper goatee and omnivorous musical tastes, Stew has waded into fraught waters to narrate the tale of a “black bohemian” (clearly based on himself but simply named Youth) in search of authenticity. Fittingly for a black man who calls his rock band the Negro Problem, he takes an ironic but nonetheless chastening view toward how race skews everyone’s expectations of an artist, even — or especially — the artist’s own expectations.

After unfulfilling stints with his church choir and an inept punk band called the Scaryotypes, Youth (Daniel Breaker) leaves his mother (Eisa Davis) and their middle-class Los Angeles existence to “seek the real” in Europe. First up is Amsterdam, which offers everything his pot-smoking choir director promised: cheap hashish and plentiful sex. (“Movement coordinator” Karole Armitage, a go-to choreographer among the tastemaker set in the 1980s, largely confines her efforts here to a few provocative group gropes.) It all proves to be too much fun for the budding singer-songwriter, though, and he decides to throw a wet towel over his libido and head to Berlin — “a forest of sharp corners.”

“‘Passing Strange’ contains the use of theatrical haze,” warns a sign in front of the theater, and this is where Stew and director/co-creator Annie Dorsen let the haze grow a bit thick. Youth’s ambivalence toward Berlin’s mirthless sobriety expresses itself in ways both obvious — a lampoon of German performance art — and intriguing. He finally finds a saleable voice here, but it’s a shameful one: He caters to Europeans’ worst stereotypes of black America as he creates a style he calls “Afro-Industrial-Post-Minstrelismus.” (One piece is titled “Hattie McDaniel Chases Faust Out the Ghetto for Tracking Mud Into the Kitchen of Her Psyche.”) Just as light-skinned blacks sometimes try to “pass” for white, Youth concocts a fraudulent identity to “pass” for black.

This is clearly meant to signify a betrayal of musical authenticity, but Stew and co-composer Heidi Rodewald (also the onstage bassist) try to have it both ways. A major point in Youth’s growth comes when his girlfriend in Berlin, the “anarchofeminist legend” Desi (Rebecca Naomi Jones), implores him to open up emotionally. After crafting a specific musical aesthetic for Berlin and its inhabitants, Stew and Ms. Rodewald resort to a thoroughly Westernized R&B idiom for Desi’s big love ballad. Are they making a pointed statement about the pervasiveness of Western culture? Or merely falling back on an audience-pleasing idiom regardless of its suitability?

Ms. Dorsen has accomplished several laudable feats, not the least of which is maneuvering her talented sextet of actors around Stew’s backup band, which is arrayed on all four sides of the stage. Stew himself, who fluctuates between a caressing baritone and a sturdy blues holler, is situated somewhat awkwardly in the middle, often perched behind a music stand or a table. (The only other scenic element is a stunning neon wall, designed by Kevin Adams and David Korins, that suggests a collaboration between Dan Flavin and Willy Wonka.) Stew’s whipsmart lyrics graft the nimble virtuosity of spoken-word poetry onto a dense indie-soul score that incorporates everyone from Joe Jackson to John Legend to Jimi Hendrix.

The narrative flab in “Passing Strange” is not confined to the Berlin sequence. Bad acid trips are a consistent exception to the Playwriting 101 dictum “Show, don’t tell,” and Ms. Dorsen’s staging of one adds little beyond five minutes to the story. And a final set of plot twists forces the narrative into a rather ponderous climax.

But Stew is too crafty and too ambitious to let these shortcomings slow him down. He tweaks the received wisdom of racial identity as cannily and wittily as any playwright since George C. Wolfe when he unleashed “The Colored Museum” in 1986. And judging from the verve and commitment shown by his performers (Ms. Jones and Colman Domingo stand out in several smaller roles), he has struck a nerve within a community that all too rarely gets a chance to articulate this level of ambivalence and complexity.

“If yer ever nor sure what we’re on about,” Stew sings early on, “just ask the song.” The answers may not adhere to many established templates for musical theatre, but they’re very much worth hearing.

“Passing Strange” until June 3 (425 Lafayette St., between West 4th Street and Astor Place, 212-967-7555).