David Lynch is an artist unafraid to exhibit his sketchbooks. Lynch rsquo;s latest offering mdash;a three-hour dreamscape titled Inland Empire mdash;isn rsquo;t the first time he rsquo;s made a foray into the kingdom of the mind with little conventional regard for narrative form or audience satisfaction. Here, Lynch tells another Hollywood-based story mdash;this time about Nikki (Laura Dern), an actress involved in a dangerous, murky remake of a European film.

Lynch sketches out variations on familiar themes mdash;multiple personalities, mysterious beings, time warps, sexual paranoia mdash;and gives them a somewhat coherent tone through the subconscious buzz of ironic pop songs (Little Eva rsquo;s ldquo;The Locomotion, rdquo; Nina Simone rsquo;s ldquo;Sinner Man rdquo;).

We rsquo;ve already seen similar sketches in such recent Lynch films as Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway. That means the most fascinating thing about Inland Empire is the degree to which Lynch rsquo;s personal cosmology (deliberately disturbing, if not off-putting figures and devices) has become an accepted mdash;and expected mdash;part of contemporary film culture.

Since Lynch is releasing Inland Empire himself (no major theatrical distributor would take it on; it opens at IFC Center), it rsquo;s clear that he has no shame about repeating himself. Lynch obviously depends on a devoted audience that is interested in his continuing oeuvre and the twisting of his mind. (These viewers are not perturbed by obvious silliness such as the rabbit-like characters who pop up here.

) The film rsquo;s gloomy title is an art-student rsquo;s invitation to project: Come visit unreachable, far-off places; journey through someone else rsquo;s egotistical labyrinth. As Dern rsquo;s Nikki disintegrates into her newest film role as Sue, the adulterous murder mystery may possibly reflect back on Nikki rsquo;s own professional and private crises. Still, Inland Empire must be taken in a relaxed attitude as Lynch rsquo;s in-joke, a psychotic, Bosch-like doodle.

It seems designed to confound newcomers as much as to delight devotees.

In some ways, though, Inland Empire isn rsquo;t exactly cinema. Lynch boasts of working in a new, less encumbered fashion, using a consumer-quality Sony PD-150 digicam.

This was a bad decision. Frankly, it looks like crap. Artist that he is, Lynch hasn rsquo;t solved the problem of video rsquo;s fluctuating, out-of-register skin tones or the general problem of visual murk.

He wants to hijack movie audiences and take them to the lesser realm of gallery installations and home-sketchpad-digital whimsies. But does the willingness of critics to gallery-hop make our film culture more sophisticated than in periods of truly revolutionary and controversial film aesthetics? Are we smarter because we don rsquo;t question Lynch rsquo;s confounding mannerisms the way critics once foolishly scoffed at Alain Resnais rsquo; magnificent Last Year at Marienbad or Ingmar Bergman rsquo;s Persona?

The real enigma of Inland Empire is how it seduces critics who ignored Juli a n Hern a ndez rsquo;s very beautiful and artful Broken Sky; they lack the confidence to see what rsquo;s wrong when Lynch is simply being wacky as in Wild at Heart, Lost Highway and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.

Back in the landmark 1990 TV series, ldquo;Twin Peaks, rdquo; Lynch achieved an unprecedented level of public mesmerization and artistic advance. His subcult strangeness blended with the most basic populist electronic genre mdash;the TV soap opera mdash;transformed modern culture.

This achievement was equal to Dickens or Griffith, yet Lynch stayed obstinately unconventional. That he balked at the pop side of his talent became evident in the way Fire Walk with Me, a sequel/prequel to the Twin Peaks series but devised for theatrical distribution, distended and weakened the series rsquo; greatness. The mix of TV simplicity and cinematic ambiguity found in ldquo;Twin Peaks rdquo; explored pop formats, national secrets about families, the specter of sin, the lure of death, the guilt of sex, the innocence of romance and the undercurrent of madness and violence in human beings that goes against nature and produces a cosmic void.

Shockingly, this great artistic leap led to grisly CSI imitations and Lynch rsquo;s own repetitive foundering mdash;with the exceptions of the excellent but unpopular The Straight Story and Mulholland Drive.

Lynch rsquo;s retreat into the arcane of Inland Empire betrays the revolution he almost started. Having already established his high-art credentials (receiving carte blanche that is denied even Matthew Barney), Lynch doesn rsquo;t run into the problem that his surrealist rival Brian DePalma faced with The Black Dahlia.

Critics expect DePalma to follow Hollywood narrative conventions despite his constant subversion of them, while Lynch is permitted to make capital-A art. Fact is, Inland Empire rsquo;s conceptual obscurities are less enthralling than the latest DePalma and Barney.

Compared to third-rate attempts at ldquo;art rdquo; mdash;like Fur, Birth, Babel, The Fountain mdash;Lynch displays provocative assurance and originality.

His somber ironies about Hollywood expose the superstitions and biases of different classes and assorted competing egos. Nikki rsquo;s freakouts on street corners seem symptomatic of some social malaise that Lynch sketches with great command and confidence. But Dern represented sexual Americana more memorably in Rambling Rose.

Here, an overworked Dern walks in and out of corridors, drawing rooms, soundstages, continents and time as if she and the maestro know exactly what they rsquo;re doing without divulging their intentions to the audience. It rsquo;s moviegoers who must compromise their entertainment standards.