They say there are no new ideas in Hollywood, but how about this one - a bittersweet romantic comedy/SF thriller taking place inside the protagonist’s brain, a wrecked landscape where memories of love are crumbling and vanishing even as he tries desperately to reclaim them?

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is an example of what I’ll call for convenience’s sake a narrative puzzle film, a subgenre that gained currency in the U.S. with the arrival in 1995 of The Usual Suspects, which featured a wholly unreliable narrative in the labored service of a gotcha ending. That laid some of the groundwork for Memento, a more impressive film that took an interest in the psychology that could be revealed by its backward-moving storytelling. But Eternal Sunshine is more sophisticated than either of 'em, in part because it doesn’t rely on violence and crime-drama storytelling to keep its complicated narrative in motion. Instead it’s merely about a couple of people who used to be in love but don’t get along so well anymore.

The only real precursor for this kind of unclassifiable thing in mainstream American film is, well, Being John Malkovich, directed from another script by the intellectually precocious Charlie Kaufman, who has made a career of taking the idea of the internal monologue to new levels. But the highbrow critics are comparing it to films by Tarkovsky and Resnais, both of whom know a little something about memory and longing and the ways our memories of the lives we experience have of folding in on themselves. The difference is that Tarkovsky and Resnais are poetic in temperament, content to express the ways in which memory and experience fold in on themselves without turning them into the kind of perfect little origami figures Kaufman specializes in.

If anything, Kaufman’s scripts are consistently overthought. That makes him a good match for music-video directors like Spike Jonze, who made Malkovich and Adaptation, and Michel Gondry, who directed Human Nature and now this film. Music videos by those directors were three- and four-minute mini-movies, notoriously overstuffed with jokes, stunts and sleight of hand. Gondry in particular was a maestro of screen space, tearing up the geography of film and video with an image-twisting glee best displayed in his videos for “Star Guitar” by the Chemical Brothers, “Come Into My World” by Kylie Minogue, and especially the Chemical Brothers’ “Let Forever Be.” Gondry made that video into an elaborate mini-musical depicting the days in the life of a perfume sales clerk — with dancing interludes — that used well-worn video effects as design ideas for transitions that morphed the woman’s environment from bedroom to street corner to department store.

The manipulation takes place on a grander scale in Eternal Sunshine, where Jim Carrey — playing Joel, a lovelorn man-child who signs on to have his memories of an unhappy love affair with Clementine (Kate Winslet) erased from his brain — finds himself consciously stumbling through the map of his own memories. So as Joel flits from experience to experience, Gondry has to visually represent the abrupt shifts in his thoughts, allowing him to step from a Barnes & Noble sales floor through a doorway into his apartment, or from a natural environment to a bleak, forbidding one as he drops into a chair. (CG plays a surprisingly peripheral role in this process, with Gondry relying on instead on many practical effects.) And as different elements of Joel’s life are wiped from his memory, they can be seen blinking out of the image on screen, like city lights slowly winking out at sunrise.

With all the visual metaphors and the deliberately tricky trajectory of the storyline, Eternal Sunshine is veritably breathless. Watching it is like trotting up a stairway and pausing, winded, at each landing to assess the new scenery that’s now visible before jogging up the next flight. It’s intellectually audacious, but maybe a little cold and enervating. The problem is that its emotional impact relies on your ability to key into the relationship between Joel and Clementine, but said relationship is kept at an intellectual distance by the never-ending cascade of narrative tricks and pirouettes. Although the film is suffused with sadness and longing, Gondry rarely spares time to show much joy or warmth in their relationship. It feels like the erased-memory metaphor isn’t so much a way of revealing truths about human relationships as the love story is just a necessary hook for a narrative idea that Kaufman is determined to explore.

Give Gondry credit for wrestling the massive star ego that is Jim Carrey to the cinematic ground — for the first time ever, the character he plays here is recognizably human, if a mite dull. The old grandstanding Carrey breaks through only a couple of times, when he plays out scenes from his childhood with a broadly comic sensibility that’s jarring in context. For example, there’s an emotional moment in the film’s last scene that Carrey blows because his mugging is so obvious. But there are also some payoffs to his against-type casting, as when we hear him complain rather stuffily — Jim Carrey! — that Clementine is uneducated and doesn’t pronounce words correctly. (Who does he think he is?) As the vivacious young woman who penetrates Joel’s 40something miserablism, Winslet is terrific, but, well, what else is new?

Interestingly, the film’s ending remains ambiguous. Surely Gondry and Kaufman mean to say that even doomed relationships are worthwhile; better to have loved and lost, all that. But I think the film also suggests, as time folds in on itself and reveals the bad feelings yet to come, that “doomed” may be too strong a word, and we humans may be too quick to give up on each other. That’s not to say it romanticizes the idea of second chances — one character’s subplot has a tragic twist ending that shows the danger of repetitive self-destructive behavior, especially when you don’t allow yourself to learn from the experiences you’ve already had. What’s tantalizing is the feeling that, at the end of the movie, these two are stronger and smarter for the glimpse they get at how crazy they drove each other in a past life that neither of them remembers. And that, perhaps, out of the pain they feel anew, some state of bliss might yet be achieved. Eternal sunshine indeed; here’s a movie that celebrates the spots.