THE TRUTH ABOUT CHARLIE Kaufman works without a net in Synecdoche, New York.

Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman first caught the world’s attention with Being John Malkovich (1999), a movie about a puppeteer who invades the mind of one of America’s strangest actors.

Three years later, Kaufman reteamed with director Spike Jonze for Adaptation, which purported to chronicle Kaufman’s struggles to adapt Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief —and might just as well have been called Being Charlie Kaufman.

Now this fall comes Synecdoche, New York, the most unfettered dose of Kaufmania yet—Being “Charlie Kaufman,” if you will. Given the film’s story of an eccentric theater director (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who endeavors to stage his autobiography on a life-size set, it’s difficult not to read the main character as a stand-in for the maverick screenwriter—not least because, for the first time, Kaufman is directing his own script.

When it premiered at Cannes in May, few knew exactly what to make of the film. It left the festival prizeless, and reviews were all over the map. Comparing Synecdoche to both Malkovich and Kaufman’s Oscar-winning screenplay for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The New York Times’ A.O. Scott enthused that the writer-director had now “made those efforts look almost conventional.”

On the flip side were charges of solipsism. The movie is “a maiden directorial voyage saved only by its actors from comparison to the Titanic’s,” according to The Village Voice’s J. Hoberman. The film took a surprisingly long time—two months—to find a distributor, but it will finally arrive in theaters in November, when both those who admired it and those who scratched their heads will have a chance to get a second look. This much is clear: Kaufman takes real chances with his structure—which folds in on itself repeatedly—and the movie shows a level of visual confidence rarely seen in a first-time filmmaker.

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