³Do I have an original thought in my head?" The question plagues poor Charlie Kaufman. Flush with the success of Being John Malkovich, Charlie is hired to write a screenplay based on New Yorker writer Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief. Wrestling a series of related concepts -- adapting someone else's book, making that adaptation original, making that adaptation comprehensible not to mention vaguely marketable -- he frets, a lot. He frets himself right into the movie you're watching.

The screenplay for Adaptation is credited to Charlie Kaufman and his twin brother, Donald Kaufman, a fictional sibling as self-confident as Charlie is insecure. The movie includes L.A. scenes in which Charlie and Donald (both played by Nicolas Cage) argue and Charlie works on his screenplay, as well as scenes where Orlean (Meryl Streep) meets with her book's subject, John Laroche (Chris Cooper). Set in and around the Florida Everglades where he's tracking and stealing rare orchids, in particular, the "ghost orchid," these encounters leave Susan flushed and skeptical, riding in Laroche's pickup truck, scribbling notes about his "delusions of grandeur." But she finds herself drawn to his toothless grin and odd serial commitments -- to turtles when he was a child, to fossils, to fish, and now, to orchids. Consumed and all-consuming, Laroche is impatient and compassionate, a shaggy-haired, self-educated expert on the vast world of orchids.

Charlie's version of Susan's story is about her rejection of a former life, her growing appreciation of her strange subject. (This version is, of course, related to Charlie's own desire to be appreciated.) She withdraws from her literary friends and husband back in Manhattan, reconsiders her own priorities, imagines herself reflected in Laroche. In him, she sees (or more precisely, Charlie sees her seeing) the passion she believes she lacks, just as Charlie sees himself in her.

Resplendently self-referential, Adaptation careens between fiction and confession, repetition and revelation. The second collaboration for Kaufman and director Spike Jonze, the film zips and zaps between scenes and realities. At one point Charlie, grasping for a "first scene," reels his mind back to the beginning of time, and the screen fills with time-lapsey digital-whoosh magic -- watery swirls, crawling fishies, lumbering dinosaurs, rising monkeys and flowers and plants. Speedy and thrilling, it all leads to Charlie, the conjurer, sweating and panting, unable to think how to get from A to B.

As Charlie lurches about in his funky panic over whether he "sucks," Donald pushes on blithely, asking for advice on his own latest script, something about a serial killer with a gimmicky M.O. Munching his hero sandwich, crumbs dropping on his chest, Donald boasts that Mom called his script "Silence of the Lambs meets Psycho." Arrgh: exactly the commercial pitch type of thinking that Charlie can't abide. Worse, Charlie endures sleepless nights while Donald makes noisy love with his girlfriend (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a makeup artist he met on the set of Being John Malkovich. (Flashbacks to this set are neat little in-jokes, including a moment where Malkovich, in the restaurant full of actors in John Malkovich masks, adopts an especially imperious pose, demanding that the shot run smoothly because those masks are hot: He would know.)

Everywhere he turns, Charlie feels pressure, to perform and produce, to make art. To adapt. This last takes a surprising turn, as Charlie begins to admire Donald, to absorb his lesson-by-example. "We all write in a genre," Donald smiles blandly. "Mine's thriller. What's yours?" He's as comfortable in his bromides as he is in his bulky body, content (even proud) to use the formula for screenplay writing proffered by notorious script instructor Robert McKee (Brian Cox).

At first, Charlie insists that scripts should reflect "life," where people fail, where nothing happens. But Charlie, and his script, change. And Adaptation becomes -- ostensibly -- less heady, more thrilling, with a climax Donald might write, complete with car chase and sentimental self-disclosure. It's easy to read this turn as a descent, an abandonment of the film's initially giddy, self-congratulatory Malkovichian warps and spins.

Or you might see it as an arrogant dismissal of the sort of formula that Charlie's been deriding all along, taking Charlie's perspective, namely, alarm and dismay that the plot has become so predictable.

Then again, in this movie, what looks predictable is also unpredictable. As much as Charlie -- the self-hating and supercilious Neurotic Artist -- rejects change, he's bound to it as well. Suddenly, in his eyes, Donald does appear different rather than just more of the abhorrent same, his corniness indicates openness rather than limitation. Believing fervently in his ordinary dreams, he's extraordinarily generous, as nonjudgmental as Charlie is caustic and critical. Charlie is stunned.

Still, the relentlessly self-critical Adaptation isn't about to reward sentimentality. It seeks originality. It seeks not to suck, but more than that, it seeks to survive sucking. Adaptation, the film proposes, is not about change as much as it's about survival.

Adaptation, Directed by Spike Jonze, A Sony Pictures release,Opens Friday at area theaters