PAINED PAINTING: Max Minghella as Art School Confidential's tortured artist.

For Jerome, art is a means to an end. To achieve it, when he's of age (and played by Max Minghella), he leaves the burbs for a New York City art school, Strathmore Academy. Here he finds the types of students director Terry Zwigoff and writer Daniel Clowes already zapped in Ghost World: the kiss-ass, the vegetarian hippie, the skater, the angry lesbian, the art school chick, and Jerome's roommates, gay fashion major Matthew (Nick Swardson) and horror aficionado/film student Vince (Ethan Suplee).

Jerome's drawing class buddy, Bardo (Joel David Moore), categorizes them all, while admitting he is also a "living cliche," the "guy who keeps dropping out and changing his majors because he's afraid he sucks at everything." Clever as he is—something like the boy version of Ghost World's Enid—Bardo disappears for much of the film, which focuses instead on Jerome's less acute perspective. His pursuit of greatness takes a wholly bland form, namely, a fixation on languid life-drawing model Audrey (Sophia Myles), whose father happens to be a famous Strathmore grad and whose cynicism toward the business of art doesn't stanch Jerome's tedious enthusiasm.

He clings to his self-righteousness even when he meets Jimmy (Jim Broadbent), a Strathmore graduate now locked away in his grubby apartment, where he paints a little, drinks a lot, and rails incessantly at the wholesale corruption of art. "Are you exceptionally skilled as a cocksucker?" Jimmy asks Jerome on their first encounter, announcing that this is the most assured route to greatness.

The role models at Strathmore only underline Jimmy's assessment: drawing instructor Sandiford (John Malkovich) spends class time on the phone trying to set up a show for his own paintings; art history teacher Sophie (Anjelica Huston) asks the right question ("What makes art timeless?"), then listens wearily as the students spout PC rage at such "implementations of masculinity." And a successful grad (Adam Scott) returns to advise the wannabes to follow their "true natures," even if, as in his case, such pursuit makes him "an asshole."

Jerome's classroom experiences—no matter what they are—repeatedly confirm his sense of superiority. When he bashes other students' work for being insipid, they alternately dissolve in tears or bash back. At last, Jonah (Matt Keeslar), who appears least talented and most adamantly shallow, wins praise in drawing class, his childlike images of tanks and cars set against splashes of yellow and orange making classmates scramble for language: "It's as if he's unlearned everything," they gush.

As much as Jerome's harsh appraisals of his peers and his teachers seem warranted, Art School Confidential doesn't exactly endorse his aspirations. Depressed when Audrey—that girl of his arty dreams who's so bland you're likely to forget about her when she's not on screen—also falls for the conventionally handsome, seemingly unserious Jonah, Jerome only tries harder to win her. Copying Jonah's style, he reframes his initial desire to be the "greatest artist of the 21st century" as a desire to possess Audrey: She becomes the measure of his greatness.

Such convoluted, self-serving reasoning is what Art School's art world is all about. As the movie has it, all roads lead to corruption. The greatness Jerome seeks so fervently is precisely what he cannot see and embodies perfectly, an other-bludgeoning, relentlessly self-involved assessment of "art." While he dismisses his blissfully plunging-ahead classmates as tasteless Neanderthals, he is reminded repeatedly that they appreciate one another's work. The historical trick is that such eyes of beholders do tend to determine "greatness," at least in the sense of sales and legends.

The more literal version of Jerome's judgmental attitude comes in the form of a not-so-compelling subplot about a local serial killer. While befuddled detectives and sensational media coverage inspire Vince to structure his "authentic" film project so that it more or less follows the case—and to assert that the killer in his film is making an "artistic statement"—Art School Confidential presents this cliched subplot (available in any profiler-focused TV series) as its own sort of convoluted reasoning. As inspiration or as acting out, the serial killer shows skills that parallel those of the students. For all the seeming celebration of originality and rebellion, repetition remains a most effective form of art.

Art School Confidential Directed by Terry Zwigoff A Sony Classics release Opens Friday at Ritz Bourse