Storytelling. (What, lies beneath? Todd Solondz is back in the outrage zone with Storytelling, an amorality tale of the ways artists distort the truth).

Storytelling * Written and directed by Todd Solondz * Starring Mark Webber, Paul Giamatti, Selma Blair, Leo Fitzpatrick, Robert Wisdom, and Mike Schank * Fine Line Features

Is it fair to discuss a white college student who is sexually assaulted by her black writing professor in the same breath as a high school student who receives oral sex from his hang-out buddy? They are both key events in Todd Solondz's latest act of provocation, Storytelling, but the manner in which they are related (or not) provides an interesting study in contrasts.

In "Fiction," the first and shorter film in Solondz's two-part thumb-noser, raped student Vi (Selma Blair) trumpets her experience to her fellow classmates in the form of a graphically detailed short story in which little has been done to disguise characters and events. In "Nonfiction," the bedroom fellatio performed on Scooby (Mark Webber) is inadvertently missed by a documentary filmmaker (Paul Giamatti) who purports to be doing a no-holds-barred analysis of this alienated suburban teenager.

How real events become filtered and corrupted by artists is at the heart of this ballsy gesture from the maker of Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness. In both "Fiction" and "Nonfiction," the exploitation of one person's suffering for another person's entertainment results in serious credibility issues. None of her classmates buy into Vi's fictionalization, even as it hugs close to the truth, while none of the audience who get to see Giamatti's completed film are privy to an essential component of its subject's makeup: his sexuality. All of Scooby's family and schoolmates assume he's gay; he may or may not be and doesn't seem to care. But the gap between public perception and concealed reality exposes the lie of omission in Giamatti's incompetent stab at truth-telling.

Solondz makes some pointedly self-referential cast choices: "Fiction" features Leo Fitzpatrick of Larry Clark's controversial piece of cinema verite fiction Kids, while "Nonfiction" includes Neanderthal slacker Mike Schank from Chris Smith's derisive true-life study American Movie. Both of those films commit transgressions of storytelling, the director loudly implies. Solondz's own impulse to underscore his message at every other turn is the chief storytelling sin of an otherwise ribald and welcome work of social commentary.

Stuart is film critic and senior film writer at Newsday.