September 17, 1999 | Stunned disbelief is the only rational response to Breakfast of Champions, a ghastly misfire that brings out the self-indulgent worst in everyone involved. The scenario, based on a cult-fave novel written by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. in the 1970s, has been updated to unfold in a contemporary Middle American milieu. But the time-warping doesn't help: At its frequent worst, the movie reeks of the anything-goes sophomoric social satire that prevailed in the lesser counterculture comedies of 20 and 30 years ago.

Bruce Willis makes an admirable but ill-advised effort to demonstrate his versatility in the lead role of Dwayne Hoover, the kind of flamboyant car dealer who achieves local superstardom by appearing in his own cheesy commercials. Dwayne is imploding under the pressure of discontent and self-doubt, and losing his tenuous grip on what passes for sanity in Midland City. And yet, for all his suicidal tendencies and hallucinatory fantasies, he is a paragon of mental normalcy compared to most of the folks around him.

Celia (Barbara Hershey), Dwayne's wife, is a pill-popping zombie who blisses out on the feel-good fantasies offered in television ads - yes, even those featuring her husband - while Bunny (Lukas Haas), their son, is a pompadoured lounge singer who croons in a hotel bar. Harry Le Sabre (Nick Nolte), Dwayne's best friend and employee, lives in constant dread of being discovered as a transvestite. Francine (Glenne Headly), Dwayne's indefatigably chipper secretary, eagerly agrees to lunchtime assignations with her boss - in the hope that he will finance her dream project, a fast-food chicken outlet.

And then there's Wayne Hoobler (Omar Epps), just out of prison and maniacally obsessed with working for, or simply being near, his kinda-sorta namesake. Call him a benign stalker, and you won't be far off the mark.

With so many oddballs in Dwayne's orbit, it is perfectly understandable that he feels the need to search elsewhere for sagacious advice about the meaning of life. Kilgore Trout (Albert Finney), a cranky sci-fi writer who's invited to appear at Midland City's first annual arts festival, provides a couple of fortune-cookie aphorisms to soothe Dwayne's troubled spirit. That may not be much, but - mercifully, thankfully - it's enough to end the movie.

Breakfast of Champions was written and directed by Alan Rudolph, whose very best films (Choose Me, Trouble in Mind, Afterglow) are gracefully melancholy romantic fantasias. But there is nothing graceful about this ham-handed, lead-footed disaster. The actors are encouraged to go way over the top, and then a bit higher, while Rudolph tightly focuses on each twitchy, eye-popping excess. At one point, Nolte - who fared much better in another Vonnegut adaptation, Mother Night - interrupts his ravenous scenery chewing to lean toward the camera and noisily snort from a nasal sprayer. It's a toss-up as to which is more embarrassing: Nolte's desperate mugging, or Rudolph's encouragement of such behavior.

To say anything more about this debacle would be needlessly unkind.