Film, it’s been both said and proven, time and again, is chiefly a director’s medium. Television is the area in which writers can most clearly and lastingly establish a distinct voice for themselves. Just like most of the movies he’s penned, however, Charlie Kaufman defies the restrictions of that categorization.

In fact, his filmography reads like a list of some of the most subversive, idiosyncratically trippy and dazzlingly audacious movies of the past decade (regardless of whether one thought they succeeded or not): Being John Malkovich, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Human Nature, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Thus, somewhat unusually, there’s already a distinguishable persona attached to Kaufman’s directorial debut — Synecdoche, New York, a sprawling, contemplative and imaginative work in which the literal and metaphorical collide in sardonic and sometimes surprisingly affecting fashion.

Attempting to condense the plot of Synecdoche, New York in a way that’s meaningfully representative of the whole is perhaps an exercise in folly, but here goes, broadly. Philip Seymour Hoffman stars as Caden Cotard, a New York theater director whose life starts to contract on him. His marriage to Adele (Catherine Keener), a painter of miniatures and celebrated artist in her own right, is fraying, and a mysterious physical (psychosomatic?) malady is shutting down his autonomic functions one by one. Things get worse when a flirtatious, would-be affair with box office ticket girl Hazel (Samantha Morton) runs aground before it even really catches fire, and Adele runs off to Europe with Caden’s daugther.

Honored with a MacArthur grant that gives him hope of creating a work of brutal honesty, Caden launches himself into a massive, Mike Leigh-esque undertaking, hiring hundreds of actors to craft an improvised, much-workshopped “living play” in a giant warehouse that contains an ever-growing mock-up of the city outside. He even hires actors, Sammy (Tom Noonan) and Tammy (Emily Watson), to play himself and Hazel, which helps contribute to the mental deterioration of new wife Clare (Michelle Williams), his former leading lady.

Synecdoche, New York (the title is pronounced “sih-neck-doh-kee”) is a movie that has the capacity to enthrall and frustrate in perhaps equal measure, depending on one’s capacity to accept elliptical plotting and abstract flavoring. For a while it unfolds as a more or less straightforward drama about a man caught up in his own head, albeit with a few heightened touches of absurdism. (Hazel lives in a house that is literally on fire, and for years Caden peruses his daughter’s forward-reading diary, long after she’s left.) Later, the movie becomes a series of slipstream moments, scattered marbles of life that serve as emotive triggers and placeholders as much if not more than conventional dramatic fodder.

What I can most easily and honestly say about Kaufman’s id-tickling, decades-spanning picture is that it has both enormous, insistent ambition and a soul, which are so frequently mutually exclusive in modern American movies. “Like” is a hard word to attach to it, not because it’s punishing or depressing, but just because it doesn’t coddle an audience, or pander. It’s largely about death and creative struggle, but it’s also whimsical and hopeful. There are a few bits with which to quibble, but it’s mostly an engrossing experience — funny, mildly unnerving (there’s a pinch of domestic creepiness that would make David Lynch proud) and affecting in unexpected, tangential ways… much like life itself, actually. (Sony Pictures Classics, R, 124 minutes)