Here we go again. Todd Solondz's new movie hasn't even hit most of the country, and already the same old arguments are thick in the air. Critics copy-and-paste their reviews of Storytelling and Happiness while hipsters squeeze into screenings to prove they still don't get him. The implicit argument goes like this: Todd Solondz may think he's smarter than his characters, but I'm smarter than him.

Given Solondz's fondness for bullshit-calling, it's possible he means Palindromes as what it's turning out to be: a litmus test for American film culture. The results are not pretty, but they are revealing. Critics who attack Solondz for his "contempt" reveal the limits of their own empathy, not to mention a lazy unwillingness to take each film on its own terms. What's most revealing about the accusation that Solondz fails to create "people we can care about" is the "we," as if the audience's shortcomings were the filmmaker's fault.

That Solondz is tired of being dogged by comparisons to the relatively humanist Welcome to the Dollhouse is clear from Palindromes' first on-screen title, which announces the funeral of Dollhouse's Dawn Weiner. It's a grenade lobbed at the audience, especially as the teary-eyed speakers recall how Dawn became depressed and obese before taking her own life, and the movie's only real act of cruelty. But it's cruelty with a purpose. Solondz knows that audiences and critics, perhaps especially the latter, retain a fondness for Dawn (simplistic as it might be, there's truth to the theory that Dollhouse's uniform raves stemmed from the fact that most movie critics were Weiner Dog in junior high). Dawn's sad death gives the lie to the sentimental notion that depressed, ostracized teenagers always "grow out of it."

Dawn's funeral also serves notice that Palindromes is not that kind of movie. In truth, Solondz moved past Dollhouse's uncomfortable naturalism as soon as he'd finished it, but it's taken three films for him to get a firm grip on what to do next. In a sense, Palindromes is, like Dollhouse, a coming-of-age movie, but this time it's Solondz who's come of age.

For better or worse, Palindromes is defined by its central conceit: The main character, pregnant 13-year-old Aviva, is played by eight different actors, ranging from pale, frail Hannah Freiman to Sharon Wilkins, an obese black woman; tiny, soft-faced Will Denton (in a brief, dialogue-free passage) to Jennifer Jason Leigh at her most fragile and withdrawn. The alienation caused by the multiple casting is as acute as in Todd Haynes' Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, which re-created the soft-rock star's tragic end using only Barbie dolls, but Solondz isn't just out to alienate. He demarcates each shift with a chapter heading and starts each segment with a close-up on the new Aviva, holding the audience's hand through the dislocating transitions.

To the unsympathetic viewer, the multiple Avivas will seem no more than a gimmick, but on repeat viewing, it becomes clear how carefully Solondz has chosen his actors: ripe but awkward Valerie Shusterov for the scene where the baby-obsessed Aviva arranges her deflowering at the hands of her cousin; ghostly, wispy Freiman for the confrontation where Aviva's mother (Ellen Barkin) essentially bullies her into having an abortion; massive, squeaky-voiced Wilkins for the fairy-tale segment in which Aviva, running away from home, discovers a Christian refuge for children with physical deformities. If Solondz has abandoned, or at least challenged, the notion of continuity, he has not given up on character altogether. Rather, he has chosen the best Aviva for each occasion, and left it to the audience to sew them into one whole-cloth persona.

Solondz's audacious device fits Palindromes' timely focus on the right-to-life debate, which hinges on the question of empathy: Do you empathize with the mother forced to have an unwanted baby, or with the potential life inside her? If Palindromes can convince its audience to feel for a character whose artificiality is evident in every jarring shape-shift, empathy is revealed as a tool, not a fact, meaningful but manipulable.

Solondz's open-ended tone reads as contempt to those unaccustomed to making up their own minds: He leaves you free to feel uneasy when a chorus of deformed children, led by the sweetly fanatical Mama Sunshine (Debra Monk), break into a peppy pop number about the evils of abortion, but it's your unease, not the film's. Reviewers have shown their discomfort with Sharon Wilkins' size by trotting out a variety of condescending euphemisms — "large," "heavy," even "steatopygous" — but few have noted the respect Solondz shows to a talented actress whose brief filmography includes roles like "Woman" and "Heavy Black Woman." True, he dresses her in Aviva's uniform of cutoff jeans and a midriff-baring top, but walk down any city street in America and you'll see larger women wearing smaller outfits. Who's disrespecting whom?

Palindromes trips up a film public that has grown to equate convention with sincerity. With its minimal, boldly colored sets, the movie announces its intentions are rhetorical rather than naturalistic, but even viewers who swallow Godard's anti-humanist provocations seem to have trouble placing Solondz in the same tradition. The knee-jerk anti-Solondz reactions inadvertently reveal his success: If "we" didn't care for his characters, it wouldn't make us angry when bad things happen to them.

As Joyce, Aviva's caring but uncomprehending mother, Barkin gives an overemphatic, school-play performance that brilliantly underlines the irony of her feigned concern. Encouraging Aviva to abort, Joyce tells the story of her own terminated pregnancy, the "little brother" she disposed of so Aviva could grow up with "nice things." Aviva's touching rationale for having children — "That way, I'll always have someone to love" — is discarded by her suddenly steely mom, who forces her to have an abortion that leaves her infertile. (Typical of the movie's strategies, this emotional climax is filmed through frosted glass.) Joyce may care for her daughter, but her concern damages her daughter as much as inaction would have.

"Spell it forwards or backwards; it's always the same," Dawn's older brother, Mark Weiner (Matthew Faber), tells Aviva, explaining the movie's title but also paving the way for a later monologue: "People always end up the way they started out. No one ever changes." Reprising his Dollhouse role (and, as ever, the spitting image of Solondz), Faber extends the accusation to the filmmaker himself. It's true that, however disparate their forms, the emotions underlying Palindromes and Dollhouse are not so different. But if people's natures don't change, their knowledge does. Palindromes is a vastly more complex, sophisticated and incendiary film than Welcome to the Dollhouse, as provocative as the films in between but with more heart than any of them. Todd Solondz has gotten out of junior high school. If only his audience would follow suit.

Palindromes Written and directed by Todd Solondz A Wellspring release Opens Friday at Ritz Five recommended