Spanner in the movie machine

Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage), a nebbishy, insecure, sweaty screenwriter, is trying to turn a hardback best-seller, The Orchid Thief, originally a piece of non-fiction by a journalist named Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep), first published in The New Yorker and hence sprawling and bloated, into a Hollywood movie.

Charlie's finding it tough going. It's got no conventional narrative, and its main character, John Laroche (Chris Cooper), a real-life drop-out who poaches protected species of wild orchids, has no front teeth.

Charlie's mind wanders. "How did I ever come to be put on earth for this," he wonders. Immediately, we see how: the whole Darwinian evolutionary process is compressed into a few seconds of screen time, before we return to sad-sack and balding Charlie, still blocked.

Enter Charlie's identical twin brother, Donald (Nicolas Cage encore), a layabout and would-be screenwriter. While Charlie works himself into a fever sweat to try to impose a plot, a hero, a heroine and a third act on his non-fiction material, Donald glibly enrols in the screenwriting seminars conducted by an itinerant real-life guru, Robert McKee (Brian Cox), and knocks out a horror flick about an Eng Lit prof with a multiple-personality disorder who chops his students into gobbets - it's entitled The Deconstructionist and sells to the movies for an instant half-million.

Charlie is still stuck - until he experiences the kind of epiphany that McKee commends in his tutorials. Charlie writes himself into his faltering script, and thus, released from his block, forges ahead writing the story as we've been watching it for an hour already, about a nebbishy, insecure screenwriter ...

Charlie Kaufman happens to be the name of the real-life screenwriter of Adaptation; he also wrote Being John Malkovich. Both films are directed by Spike Jonze.

Donald Kaufman, credited as Adaptation's co-writer, does not exist, but Cage does as neat a self-deprecating job as the real-life John Malkovich did by splitting himself in two.

As you can see, Adaptation is not your usual Hollywood movie - until, that is, Charlie reaches the point where he entered his own screenplay. Then, using McKee's prefabricated models, which have done more than possibly anything else to reduce Hollywood film-making to its present formulaic mediocrity, he turns Adaptation into a story with all the clichés: murder, drugs, car chases and sex with a feel-good ending tagged on. It shows total contempt for the movie-goers.

Adaptation is a genial joke at the expense of people with angst - but only up to a point. Jonze, a mercurial director, finesses the real Kaufman's free-form script like a nimble card-sharp. He makes it into a relationship comedy between a writer and his intractable material.

The feeling that Adaptation's Charlie Kaufman is possibly just as conflicted as The Orchid Thief 's Charlie Kaufman puts a sinister spin to the term auteur. Cage's Charlie is the author of his own fate as well as his own film.