"A chair has four legs. Now, an animal has a one-track-mind," circus trainer Dave Hoover explains, describing his reduction of a furious lion to a big, befuddled cat just by waving a chair at it. "This agitates him. He can't comprehend those four points of interest."

"I've been told by several people, 'You're old fashioned. You want to do everything by hand,'" topiary gardener George Mendonca complains, defending his continued resort to hand shears in trimming his intricately privet-sculpted animal creations. "This is the only way you can do it and do it right." Snip, snip.

"Some people believe that we are gonna replace ourselves by building these machines, and that may be," muses MIT robot scientist Rodney Brooks, who builds robots that run on instinct. "There may not be a place for humans in the future, if we're really successful."

"You feel that there's a moment of contact," says mole rat specialist Ray Mendez, describing a certain animal gaze and looking directly into Errol Morris's camera. "I know you are. You know I am."

In some ways the slickest film yet from nonfiction auteur Morris (The Thin Blue Line, A Brief History of Time), Fast, Cheap & Out of Control is reportage of the highest order. Journalism students should dream of making connections like these. Cross-cutting among interviews and filmed segments, Morris traces the lives of four disparate professionals who seem to share nothing but an immersion in their work, and then threads them around one another in an intricate quadruple helix. The fun is settling into your theater seat and wondering just what the hell one story can possibly have to do with the other. What Morris manages is something akin to an intellectual magic trick, an interrogative sleight of hand.

One of the things that feels different about an Errol Morris documentary -- besides the always-striking visuals -- is the interview style, where subjects seem to look directly at the viewer. Weary of pressing his cheek against the camera lens to get this effect during conversations, Morris developed an elaborate double-camera gadget he calls, half-jokingly, the Interrotron. Through a rig that uses a pair of teleprompters to project video images of the interviewer for the subject and vice versa, these folks talk, startlingly, right to the camera -- to the video image of Morris, and by extension to the audience.

The gardener wonders whether, after his death, anyone will be interested in maintaining the garden that he's devoted half his life to tending. The robot scientist is more than a little pleased to note that his creations may be primal examples of what an insect or even an animal is -- a complicated set of sensory receptors. The mole rat specialist is delighted to catalog the ways in which these vermin animals behave like insects, and notes that they may be more suited to long-term survival than people. And the circus trainer pines for a long-lost ideal that was exemplified by world-renowned trainer and showman Clyde Beatty, who starred in such serials as Zombies of the Stratosphere (excerpted at some length here, with affection).

Starting to detect the patterns? Fast Cheap & Out of Control contains a multitude of parallels and tiny intersections, culminating in what feels like an elegy (the film is dedicated to Morris's late mother and stepfather). The film is balanced on that airy precipice dividing the already musty past from the alternately exhilarating and terrifying space that is the future. (The title is taken from Brooks' wish that NASA would send a payload of hundreds of expendable robots to scurry about the Martian surface, creating a sort of road map for the terrain -- fast, cheap, and out of control.)

With able assists from editors Karen Schmeer and Shondra Merrill and cinematographer Robert Richardson (Oliver Stone's longtime collaborator), this becomes a cinematic contraption that's a wonder of narrative divergence and coherence. (Further enhancing the picture's wacky intellectual mood is the playful score by Alloy Orchestra founder Caleb Sampson.) Different story threads inform and comment on one another with the serene inscrutability of a Kieslowski film, or a surrealist dream. By cobbling together out of these motley musings a thesis on the nature of craftsmanship, invention, and existence itself, Morris reveals the presence of cosmic themes -- creation, evolution, death -- in earthbound lives. At the same time, and just as significantly, he pays tribute to a consuming passion for one's work. This breakdown of the dichotomy between the everyday and the extraordinary is likely as profound as anything you'll encounter in pop culture this year, and the visuals cry out for the big screen. Don't miss it.