et me first start by saying that the Brown Bunny is not, in fact "so bad it's good", despite how clever that emerging cliché sounds to critics. Vincent Gallo's lonely tribute to the road - and, of course, to himself - is less the experiment in prolonged indulgent torture its detractors claim than it is an experiment in prolonged indulgent fantasy and reflection. And who among us can claim to be innocent of that in their own minds?

The Brown Bunny's North American premiere last week at the Toronto International Film festival followed a notorious showing earlier this year at Cannes, which began with a dismal reception and ended with purported apologies, irreversible black magic voodoo curses, and, ultimately, a shorter, newer edit of the film. Perhaps no independent film has come wrapped in such a shroud of media flak and audience shock since Kids, another graphic Chloe Sevigny vehicle.

Sparse and often free of dialogue, the movie stubbornly tries to lead the viewer - the by now unavoidably guarded, negative-buzz-saturated viewer - down an intimate interior path - a long, long road if you will. The film's standoffishness may make one go reluctantly, but when Gallo, as motorcycle racer Bud Clay, tries to convince a sweet young cashier to give up all sense of reason and follow him to California, it seems hard not to give oneself over to the movie with the same amount of curious abandon that the innocent cashier gives herself over to Bud. And while suspension of disbelief is never entirely available - say, aren't we just watching Gallo take a piss because he's fascinated by himself? - the journey is at least as absorbing as it is trying.

In between the long, spectral moments of drifting and waiting - we watch seemingly endless shots of rainy interstate, Bud's daily minutae, scraps of perfectly delivered humor cast across a bleak landscape - comes the searching. Fatefully, accidentally thrown intimately and fleetingly together with a handful of heedless women named after flowers, it becomes clear that Bud is aching for Daisy (Chloe Sevigny), a woman who may or may not be waiting for him back in LA, but who nevertheless is invading Bud's roadweary mind with passionate intensity.

Working some of the same themes explored in Gallo's unimpeachable Buffalo '66, The Brown Bunny is in many ways another meditation on the art and necessity of self-delusion, the implausibility of intimacy, and the addiction to fantasy in the name of pure love. Gallo attempts elegantly - though not entirely successfully - to capture the essence of isolation and the inward spiral that comes from days alone on the open road (most gorgeously framed by Gordon Lightfoot's "Beautiful" and a few really superlative side mirror shots). As the camera tracks the highway through an increasingly dirty windshield towards ever-dimming horizons, one gets a sense that Bud is not so much going anywhere as that he's right where he's always going to be: trapped in a stillness of motion, a loop of memory, a hiss of highway wind. As much as the road - as metaphor and reality -suggests loneliness and emptiness, it isn't lost on Gallo that it's also a place of infinite potential, where, alone with one's mind, all memories and realities can converge in one point. Tracing the lines of perfection through hindsight, delusion through hope, and the nature of one's tenuous grasp on oneself, Bud's journey is an exercise in both a slow breakdown and a slow rebuilding. From the banality of an Eastern small town to the vibrant spatial shock of the Bonneville Salt Flats, Gallo's lens grabs onto the trying and mundane with as much affection as it does for the sensational, forcing the viewer's confrontation again and again with that from which he or she cannot look away.

The Brown Bunny distends itself gradually, moving from glimmer to glimmer of human vulnerability until the cataclysmic scene in which Bud is reunited with Daisy, and flooded, perhaps even drowned, by his memories of her. In the well-publicized, highly visceral sex scene in which Bud's ghosts are made realized, the film pivots on the all-too-easy lines between love and hate. The scene is challenging and harrowing, and the sense of shame and emptiness it manifests is palpable.

Bud's confrontation of Daisy echoes the brief encounters of his intimate cross-country journey: he's so caught between his involuntary desires and his hatred of those same needs, he always comes up empty handed. And maybe we are all that empty-handed: what is our grasp anyway on those who haunt us? In some ways, aren't those moments that live on just as real as those moments that flicker past us in temporal reality? How do we get ourselves to intimacy and back again? Aren't we all caught on the long road between surviving and feeling, sustaining and realizing? Whether Gallo means to take us there or not, The Brown Bunny is an inward rearview mirror to our own ghosts - and if he's laughing at the audience all the way home, so much the better.