Reality Bites.

Humbug and self-humbug are indispensable to comedy. In fact, it's hard to name a comedy or farce that doesn' t have some manner of fraud near its core. But no matter how devious or gullible characters are, their creator must remain undeceived or there is no comedy. Malvolio can kid himself into thinking that he's God's gift to women but Twelfth Night would have crumbled into incoherence if Shakespeare had bought into the steward's fantasy. Chaplin's decline as a comic genius begins in Limelight precisely because he becomes infatuated with his own hero. Comic fools may sigh over themselves but their creators must cast a cold eye.

What' s wrong with Reality Bites is that its creators, particularly scriptwriter Helen Childress, are misty-eyed. They are convinced that their characters have unfathomed depths but the moviegoer can't wade out of the shallows.

The movie deals with what happens to a bunch of kids just out of college during their searches for work and love. The most important character (Winona Ryder) is doing a stint as a TV intern while putting together a video about the aims and aimlessness of her generation. She and her roommate (Janeane Garafola) acquire a couple of unwanted male boarders, and between one of them (a rocker played by Ethan Hawke) and Ryder some erotic tension develops. Then Ryder takes a cable TV executive (Ben Stiller, Reality's director) as her lover and everything heads toward a sexual showdown. Fair enough material for a romantic comedy, but the creators of this one seem to think that they're carrying the standard for Generation X.

Take, for instance, the putalive filmmaking talent of the Ryder character. The turning point of the movie comes when the executive, having optioned Ryder' s documentary for his M.T.V.type network, tarts the video up with a lot of editing and computer-graphic cliches. Ryder' s outrage at this helps propel her from Stiller's arms into Hawke's. This is believable enough but the filmmakers have made a dreadful mistake: they let us see much of Ryder's documentary. It's limp, boring, utterly amateurish. It actually benefits from the commercial butchery. But only we see this. Director Stiller and scriptwriter Childress really seem to think that an artist has been betrayed and that therefore she is fight to throw her yuppie lover over for the feckless but pure rock poet.

But he's another problem. Ethan Hawke gives a perfectly plausible performance in the movie's first half as that sort of young man who has cultivated an air of bored disdain as an announcement of his incorruptibility. He's the latest version of Jimmy Porter, exposer of phonies in Look Back in Anger. Trouble is, when this guy comes out with lines such as "I got this arcane glimpse of the universe" and "There' s a planet of regret on my shoulders," we may begin to wonder who's the real phony. True, Childress has written some scenes in which Hawke is chided for--guess what--not committing himself. But then the musician's father dies offstage, the lad undergoes a spiritual conversion (also offstage), the lovers clinch, soft rock music cozies onto the soundtrack, the camerawork goes soft focus, and All Is Well. No, this is not a movie thai can afford to sneer at the cliches of TV.

But it's not a total waste of time. Stiller shows, in the less drippy portions of the script, that he can direct. He's particularly clever at changing/he composition of his shots without cutting by skillfully moving the actors about within a fixed camera set-up. When done well, this method gives a loose, Sundayafternoon feeling to the material that helps conceal the script's manipulations.

And the two female leads are delightful. Janeane Garafola has chunky attractiveness and campy wit. Winona Ryder is a latterday Daisy Miller, and if only this unlacquered beauty were allowed to play the James heroine then those of us exposed to the dreadful Peter Bogdanovich version of twenty years ago could forget Cybill Shepherd forever. When the roommates hear a song they like in a convenience store and break into spontaneous dance at the cash register, you may fall a bit in love with them. Perhaps the scene works simply because you're allowed to fall in love instead of being badgered into it by filmmakers cooing over their cinematic progeny.