To use a term from an era when there were other movies that felt a bit like this one, THE SINGING DETECTIVE is trippy. Based on an enormously acclaimed TV miniseries that originally ran on the BBC in 1984 and on PBS shortly thereafter, DETECTIVE goes in and out of the mind of Dan Dark (Robert Downey Jr.), a hardboiled private eye with a sideline as a 50s club crooner, currently trying to get to the bottom of a case where the audience already knows exactly what happened Except that Dan is also a writer, stuck in a hospital bed with crippling, disfiguring psoriasis and paralyzing rage, inventing adventures for his alter ego while otherwise trapped. His imagination doesnt simply confine itself to the world in which hes a singing detective, though he also spontaneously fantasizes that the doctors and nurses break into song and dance routines.

This last is perhaps the only aspect of THE SINGING DETECTIVE that doesnt seem to come out quite right. Director Keith Gordon, who excels at handling material with more twists that a Moebius strip, does a great job with all the transitions and creates layers of moods, so that the real world, Dans noir musings and his flashbacks to his childhood all feel different yet inherently linked the transitions all inform one another. When Dan is doing his cool singing act, Gordon knows how to exploit it and Downey looks to be totally having a ball (and displays a very good set of pipes). However, Gordon doesnt seem to have the soul of a song-and-dance guy the musical sequences are entertaining, but they feel like they ought to be a little more spectacular (Dans inventing them, after all his brain pulls out the stops on everything else, so why not this?). Otherwise, though, we become involved both intellectually with whats going on in the various planes and emotionally with the plight of Dan, who starts out as a truly abrasive figure and becomes progressively more sympathetic without losing his edge.

Writer Dennis Potter (who himself suffered from psoriasis) has come up with a way of getting Dans various universes real/imaginary, past/present to resonate with one another. We admire the symmetry of the connections at the same time we have a more visceral response to the characters. The screenplay adaptation, brought down to two hours from the miniseries original six, has a dense, epic quality to it, complicated but not convoluted.

Downey is terrific in a role that calls for many things barbarous nastiness, plausible Bogartian toughness and gut-wrenching misery among them, all woven together by the actor with intelligence and conviction. Robin Wright Penn and Katie Holmes are good as the women in his life, and Mel Gibson, one of the films producers, has a droll character turn as a folksy psychiatrist who looks something like a 50ish Rance Howard (description will not suffice it must be seen to be comprehended).