COMMITTED : 'American Psycho' & 'High Fidelity'.

American Psycho opens with a gorgeous protagonist taking a slow, luxurious shower. Feeling queasy? Well, don't worry about a knife tearing the shower curtain: this is eighties New York, not fifties Southern Gothic, and the monster is inside the shower. Meet Norman Ba--oops, Patrick Bateman, a twenty-seven-year-old investment banker who keeps his bathroom stocked with an impressive array of soaps, exfoliants, and other beauty products. He's going to need them all, too, since by midmovie he's sluicing away enough out-out-damned-spots to incarnadine the entire Manhattan sewer system.

Brett Easton Ellis's notorious 1991 novel took those two staples of 1980s lore, the Wall Street killer and the serial murderer, and bundled them into one buff, swaggering, Brioni-suited package of mayhem and rage. American Psycho sparked widespread revulsion for its violent misogyny, but the novel's real crime, with its lurid splatterfests and endless catalogs of brand-name products, was to pummel the reader into the same stuporous frenzy that afflicted its protagonist. You wanted to slash and slash.

Director Mary Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol) and her co-writer, Guinevere Turner, have done just that, carving out of Ellis's mountain of pop trash a quick, jagged film. Bateman is played by Christian Bale, who resembles a young James Brolin--your memories of "Marcus Welby" are in for a ghoulish new tilt--and hunches behind a mannequin-like smile, blurting murderous impulses under his breath. He hangs out in trendy bars with his fellow Wall Street young Turks, whom he hates and envies, and trades icy pleasantries with his fiancee (Reese Witherspoon). When he's dissed by a brash competitor who not only pulls off bigger deals, but gets last-minute tables at top restaurants, and keeps mistaking Bateman for someone else--well, how much is a raging narcissist supposed to take? Heads begin to roll, literally.

American Psycho isn't easy to watch, and not just because of the violence. Harron and her cinematographer, Andrzej Sekula, have created a glossy, distorted look that keeps us at a distance, partly by bringing us in too close. (Especially to faces--closer than you want to be to Bale's pretty mask, and much closer to the leering jack o'lantern of Willem Dafoe, playing a Columbo-style detective.) With its stilted dialogue, disjointed pacing, and notably flat affect, American Psycho has the feel of a personality disorder. It's as if Harron has infused Bateman's narcissism into the texture of the film, portraying identity as a series of poses and empty lines.

The movie wobbles between darkly comic Grand Guignol and a cold outrage at American excess. The former impulse is the better one. Harron tosses off genre riffs, from chainsaw massacre to mean-streets gumshoe to porn, and campy double entendres, as during Bateman's date with his sweetly adoring secretary ("I'm afraid I'll hurt you," he says, and she: "I don't want to be bruised"). During the opening credits, drops of what looks like blood falling against a white background turn out to be red berry coulis drizzled onto a dinner plate. Later, when Bateman lures a victim back to his apartment--its walls gleaming white, chairs slipcovered, newspapers taped to the floor like a huge napkin--we know some major coulis is about to be spilled.

Such ghastly wit has a life of its own, well beyond the film's ideas, which are banal. It's hardly a dazzling insight, for instance, to locate a kernel of Social Darwinism inside a career like Bateman's; maybe that's why having him murder a homeless man ("You're a loser!" he rants, stabbing him) comes off as, well, overkill. Harron and Turner can't decide whether this is satire, merrily gruesome allegorical farce, or the nightmare of a man trapped in his own violent delusion. (As the bodies pile up, we're served hints that it's all a lurid fantasy in Bateman's mind.) The film hedges its bets, manipulating its surfaces--appropriately enough--in an attempt to have it all. It's a letdown when black comedy yields to psychological tension. Then again, American Psycho is a period piece; and as Bateman self-destructs, whining and blubbering about what a bad boy he has been, perhaps we can feel the '80s obsession morphing into the '90s. Good-bye nasty monster of greed, hello inner child!

If American Psycho sounds like something you'd loathe, then you may just love High Fidelity, Stephen Frears's warmly funny account of what passes for life in a retro Chicago record store called Championship Vinyl. John Cusack stars as Rob Gordon, the store's thirty-something owner, who's frittering his days away with his two hapless employees, Barry and Dick. Together they're the Three Stooges of retail music, babbling about obscure bands, flaying their few customers with arcane expertise, and doing pitched battle over who recorded the best version of "Little Latin Lupe Lu." Needless to say, this record-geek fanaticism bodes ill for romance--how well can you be doing with women if you're this ardent about Licorice Confidence's new Japan import? When Rob gets dumped by his girlfriend Laura (the serenely beautiful Iben Hjejle), he quests into his past, revisiting his list of Top Five Breakups to figure out why his love life always hits those same old clunker notes.

Frears has given British writer Nick Hornby's novel a transatlantic change of venue, leaving Cusack to pull off an American version of London grunge. In rumpled black jeans, belted black leather jacket, and sneakers, he's a buffoon bohemian, looking weirdly like Stallone in the original Rocky--an amiable loser loafing through the city. His life, like his apartment and store, is grimy, cluttered and stale, and he's comfortable in it, loving nothing more than to sit back with a cigarette and bemoan his misery. High Fidelity must set a new mark for smashing the cinematic fourth wall; Cusack turns away from phone calls, from funerals and bedroom conquests, to pour his troubles directly into the camera. Are we his friend? His confessor? His shrink? At least we know we matter.

While American Psycho does its best to appall, High Fidelity aims to please, and please it does, a bit too eagerly, but effectively nonetheless. There's raucous fun with the store clerks (Jack Black is priceless as Barry, goateed and bellicose, berating a customer who wants to buy "I Just Called to Say I Love You"). The movie's soundtrack delivers jokey touches--swooning into Barry White as Rob visualizes Laura sleeping with her new boyfriend (Tim Robbins, in a silly cameo), then later bursting into Queen's "We Are the Champions" when he euphorically finds out she hasn't (yet). And Cusack's real-life sister Joan shows up as his screen sister, reaming him out for losing Laura, thus completing the comic picture of a sad sack so unlucky in love that when his girlfriend splits, his family sides with her.

Fans of other Frears films, like My Beautiful Launderette or The Snapper, may miss a certain edge in all this. Those movies pushed back at you from a core of perhaps-not-solvable human problems; while High Fidelity gestures at such complexities, this is romantic comedy, and the bottom line is all fluff and forgiveness. Cusack does this stuff almost too well. His breakthrough in Cameron Crowe's 1989 teen romance, Say Anything, disclosed a bankable asset that directors have been cashing in ever since--namely, the Suffering Lover, a.k.a. the Man Who Stands Outside in the Rain. Frears subjects him to repeated dousings; and by film's end, when he towels him off to deliver a soulful Top Five Things I Miss about Laura ("I miss her smell, and the way she tastes..."), the theater murmurs with sighing women.

Ultimately, Rob's trip down the romantic dead-ends of his past delivers the scratchy truth that he has been the dumper as often as the dumped--perpetually restless, unable to commit. "I guess it made more sense to keep my options open," he confesses, "and that's suicide by tiny tiny increments." Bidding adieu to his extended adolescence, he embraces good old-fashioned maturity, trading in those empty old romantic fantasies for love and commitment. High Fidelity frees Cusack from the dictatorship of the inner child and positions him for a liberating discovery of the outer adult, ready for marriage and raring to go.

Maybe now he'll even get to wear a raincoat.