'WRISTCUTTERS' IS WEIRDLY UPLIFTING.

Byline: GLENN WHIPP 

>FILM CRITIC

In "Wristcutters: A Love Story," Zia (Patrick Fugit) lives in a drab urban cesspool where sunshine resembles fluorescent light. Zia holds down a menial job at the Kamikaze Pizza parlor, a place whose pies couldn't draw flies.

Worse than the bad pizza is that nobody smiles or laughs in Zia's world. It's a mind-numbing existence that has this young man contemplating suicide -- except for one thing. He already slit his wrists, bleeding to death not long ago on the bathroom floor of his freshly cleaned apartment.

In Goran Kukic's "Wristcutters," an enjoyable and oddly affecting road trip movie that will live forever as a cult classic (but that shouldn't stop you from seeing it now), you don't risk killing yourself twice. You might end up in a place that's even worse than the absurdist afterlife that Zia and his fellow suicides find themselves.

Zia killed himself after his girlfriend, Desiree (Leslie Bibb), dumped him. (Bad breakups seem to send a lot of young men over the edge in Etgar Keret's short stories, one of which -- "Kneller's Happy Campers" -- provides the movie's source material.)

When Zia learns that Desiree killed herself, too, he hits the road with Russian rock singer Eugene (Shea Whigham) in a beat-up car that has no headlights but does possess a black hole underneath the passenger's seat.

Along the way, driving through the decaying desert (no tequila sunrises here), they pick up beautiful hitchhiker Mikal (Shannyn Sossamon) who, believing she's here by mistake, is searching for the "people in charge." Help may come when they meet the mysterious Kneller (Tom Waits), the Wizard in this rotted Oz.

First-timer Kukic made "Wristcutters" on a shoestring budget, but he really nails the movie's tone, which is strangely uplifting, given the subject matter. The Croatian-born Kukic filmed the urban scenes in downtown Los Angeles and shot the desert material in Lancaster and Palmdale with a great eye in finding the broken-down ugliness that exists in a land known for opportunity and reinvention.

It's a movie that's authentically, confidently weird, modeling Eugene on Eugene Hutz from the great punk cabaret band Gogol Bordello (the band's catchy "Through the Roof 'n' Underground" becomes the movie's philosophical anthem) and letting Waits do his soulful, shambling thing to perfection.

A life-affirming movie about suicide could go wrong in a million ways, but the understated "Wristcutters" straddles the line between sentiment and bleakness. It should enjoy a healthy afterlife.

Glenn Whipp, [phone]

[e-mail]

WRISTCUTTERS: A LOVE STORY - Three stars

>R: language, disturbing subject matter.

>Starring: Patrick Fugit, Shannyn Sossamon, Shea Whigham.

>Director: Goran Kukic.

>Running time: 1 hr. 28 min.

>Playing: AMC Century City 15.

>In a nutshell: Life-affirming movie about suicide.