"The Color Wheel," Directed by Alex Ross Perry When I saw "The Color Wheel" last year at the BAMcinemaFest, I hated every minute and was glued to my seat, unable to take my eyes off the screen. A movie that can scramble my signals so effectively, overriding deeply ingrained habits of response and judgment, is at the very least doing something interesting, so I approached a second viewing with wary respect. That has now evolved into qualified admiration. "The Color Wheel" remains, in my estimation, a singularly unpleasant movie: full of obnoxious characters in scenes that seem overwritten and under-rehearsed, oblivious to the most basic standards of tonal consistency, narrative coherence or visual decorum. But it is also sly, daring, genuinely original and at times perversely brilliant. Shot (by Sean Price Williams) in a black-and-white palette that is at once naturalistic and hallucinatory, "The Color Wheel" follows a brother and a sister on a desultory road trip from Pennsylvania to Boston and beyond. J R (Carlen Altman) has recently broken up with the professor she had been involved with - despite their intimacy, she insists on referring to him as "the professor" - and she enlists her younger brother, Colin (Alex Ross Perry), to accompany her on the drive. The phrase "sibling rivalry" is hardly adequate to describe the animus between J R and Colin, whose interaction consists of almost nonstop sniping, undermining and other forms of verbal abuse. It is impossible to take a side, since, if anything, each one is even worse than the other thinks. J R, who aspires to be a television news anchor, is vain, needy and abrasive, but at least seems to possess an idea of what it would mean to be charming. Colin - Mr. Perry's reedy voice recalls Michael Cera's - is a virtual caricature of male ineffectuality: whiny, passive-aggressive, pointlessly sarcastic. When we first meet him he is trying to cajole his girlfriend, Zoe (Ry Russo Young), into having sex with him, and his petulant insistence makes the guys in "Girls" look like junior George Clooneys in comparison. "The Color Wheel" - directed by Mr. Perry from a script he and Ms. Altman wrote together - is a series of episodes awash in discomfort and humiliation, some quite funny. J R and Colin stop for a night at a bizarre motel run by a religious fanatic who will rent rooms only to married couples and who demands that potential guests prove their marital status by kissing. A painful visit with the professor (Bob Byington) is followed by a nightmarish party with acquaintances from high school. Everyone is so appallingly mean that you begin to feel an undertow of sympathy for J R and Colin, who mutate from awful to merely pathetic, like caterpillars morphing into some other kind of worm. Though it is a modest, low-budget project made by, and to some degree for, a group of like-minded young people (the supporting cast is full of fledgling filmmakers), "The Color Wheel" is more than just another solipsistic mumblefest. Like Mr. Perry's first feature, "Impolex," a surreal, bare-bones adaptation of a snippet of Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow," it shows startling formal ambition. So many rules are broken - not least the convention that movie acting should be grounded in some notion of psychological realism - that you might be tempted to conclude that Mr. Perry has no idea what he is doing. But at the same time it is impossible to deny his sophistication, or his control over the film's volatile mix of tones and effects. "The Color Wheel" is infuriating, but never boring. I used to think there was a thin line between love and hate, but that's just something from an old song. In this movie there is no such line. The Color Wheel Opens on Friday in Brooklyn and Boston. Produced, directed and edited by Alex Ross Perry; written by Mr. Perry and Carlen Altman; director of photography, Sean Price Williams; music by Preston Spurlock; production design by Anna Bak-Kvapil; released by Cinema Conservancy. At the BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas, 30 Lafayette Avenue, at Ashland Place, Brooklyn. WITH: Carlen Altman (J R), Bob Byington (Professor Neil Chadwick), Kate Lyn Sheil (Julia), Anna Bak-Kvapil (Kim Thompson), Ry Russo-Young (Zoe), Alex Ross Perry (Colin), Craig Butta (Norton the Bully), C. Mason Wells (Chris Locke) and Roy Thomas (Motel Clerk).