April 26, 2002 | How's this for an entrance? Smack dab in the middle of a blazing hotel room – or, perhaps, some lower circle of hell – an indolent trumpet player remains oblivious to the flames surrounding him while wailing melancholy jazz. Through raspy-sounding voiceover, he informs us that his name is “Tom, or Danny, I don’t really know.” And he might be “an avenging angel, a prodigal son, loving husband or prince of darkness.” Or maybe all of the above.

Here and elsewhere in The Salton Sea, a movie fueled by equal measures of dreamy despair and bemused fatalism, director D.J. Caruso seems to be taunting us, almost daring us, with a kind of frankly show-offy stylization. It’s as if he wants to see how far he can saunter off the beaten track, and assume his audience will follow his lead, while covering what only appears to be familiar territory.

Some of Caruso’s visual and narrative tropes are boldly, bracingly imaginative, while others are just so much empty posturing. But the cumulative effect is appropriately unsettling: You seldom know what will happen next, or who will survive any of it.

Val Kilmer is arrestingly enigmatic – and, when the moment is right, achingly tragic – as the trumpeter introduced in the opening minutes. He continues to serve as a sometimes witty, sometimes wistful narrator as Tom, or Danny, leads us through flashbacks that tell us why he’s in the burning room, and why he’s not particularly concerned about getting out.

Danny – let’s stick with that name, shall we? – identifies himself as a garishly tattooed and thoroughly wired member of L.A.’s methamphetamine subculture, one of several wigged-out layabouts who rant and rave for days on end about nothing in particular. Jimmy (Peter Sarsgaard), his best buddy, knows the best places to buy the most potent meth. Trouble is, some of those best places are where they get into the worst trouble.

In a darkly hilarious scene that recalls a similarly tense stand-off in Boogie Nights, Danny and Jimmy visit the motel-room headquarters of Bobby (Glenn Plummer), a dealer who has cranked himself up to a level of super-paranoia while sampling too much of his own merchandise. Bobby greets his potential customers by brandishing a spear gun, and disciplines a troublesome girlfriend by keeping her stuffed under his mattress. But Danny and Jimmy are too frightened, and too wasted, to complain or criticize.

Later, Danny witnesses more bizarre behavior when he calls on another dealer, Pooh-Bear (Vincent D’Onofrio), a volatile supplier who snorted so much of his stuff that he had to have his nose surgically removed. Now he wears a prosthetic proboscis that makes him resemble Porky Pig’s bad-seed brother, and entertains himself by staging re-enactments of the JFK assassination with pigeons in model cars.

Cackling like a banshee and feasting on the scenery, D’Onofrio goes over the top, takes a deep breath, then bounds further into the ozone. It’s much too much, which is exactly what the role requires, especially when Pooh-Bear uses a ravenous badger to coax information from a possibly treacherous underling. D’Onofrio may be the spookiest movie villain of the year, and he enjoys himself so much that his sardonic merriment is highly contagious.

Meanwhile, back on the planet Earth, Danny must cope with a bad cop/worse cop duo (Anthony LaPaglia, Doug Hutchison), an urban cowboy named Bubba (B.D. Wong), a fellow meth addict (Adam Goldberg) with elaborate plans for a big score – which cue a uproarious daydream that curdles into a chaotic nightmare – and a next-door neighbor (Luis Guzman) who uses his live-in girlfriend (Deborah Kara Unger) as a punching bag.

But wait, there’s more: From time to time, Danny thinks about a woman, possibly his wife, who spent a lovely, long-ago day with him on the shore of the Salton Sea in the Southern California desert. She’s no longer around, however. And while I could tell you why, you likely wouldn’t thank me for spilling the beans.    

The Salton Sea is an edgy, triple-twist neo-noir thriller with a brutally cynical sense of humor and an erotically charged atmosphere of danger. It’s also a difficult movie to talk or write about, because of the serpentine path it takes toward its final, fatal destination.

Tony Gayton’s script is so deviously twisted when it comes to providing motivation and exposition that we’re a good half-hour or so into the movie before it’s even partially clear just who is doing what to whom, and why they’re doing it. Indeed, to give even a bare-bones synopsis is to risk detonating one of the many booby traps Gayton strews throughout his plot.

Suffice it to say that, by the time we get back to that burning hotel room, it’s easy to understand why Danny, or Tom, cannot, or will not, get up and leave. And it’s even easier to care deeply about the man who’s making such sweet, sad music.