Oxman is making a film about Scooby Livingston (Mark Webber), a blank-eyed, pot-addled New Jersey teenager with no aspirations save the isolated ambition to be a TV show host. Oxman claims that the documentary will focus on the college admissions process, but he gravitates instead toward a blandly lyrical study of Scooby and his weirdly average upper-middle-class family.

Oxman, who has a Dogme 95 poster on his bedroom wall, seems earnest, but his intentions are questioned at every turn. Scooby, whom he first approaches in a high-school bathroom, asks, "Are you a pervert?" When his film editor (Franka Potente) says he seems to be mocking the Livingston family, he protests futilely. "I like these people," he says. "No you don’t," comes the response. And then Oxman replies, maybe a little too enthusiastically, "Yes I do! I love them!" With that, it becomes abundantly clear that director Todd Solondz has made a movie about critical reaction to his two previous movies, and about his responsibility to the characters that he creates.

His Happiness, whose cast included a compulsive phone stalker and a pedophile with a young son, was regarded with suspicion by viewers who believed Solondz was subjecting his protagonists to cruel mockery. His Sundance prize-winning Welcome to the Dollhouse, a dark comedy about a junior high misfit, was similarly seen as mean-spirited in some quarters. Writing about Happiness, I argued that Solondz’s approach to his miserable stories evinced compassion for the wretches caught in them. He exaggerates to the point of absurdity, of course, but it seems to me that each outsized caricature is built around a kernel of truth. The caustic humor grows from the shock of recognition.

Nobody feels that shock more clearly, I’d wager, than Solondz himself—a lanky, balding and bespectacled movie geek whose performers, from Dollhouse’s Heather Matarazzo to Storytelling’s Giamatti, are clearly cast as Solondz surrogates. The story of Toby Oxman’s documentary takes up the long second section of Storytelling, which is titled "Nonfiction." The shorter segment that opens the film is called simply "Fiction," and much of the action takes place inside a college creative-writing classroom—a gimmick that allows Solondz to stage a racially charged sexual conquest and then have a roomful of college students, whose pithy, self-absorbed remarks and putdowns are clearly meant to reflect negative critical notices, comment on the action.

It’s generally a bad idea for filmmakers to engage too fully with their critics, since work that’s keyed toward getting a specific reaction often comes across as artificial. In Storytelling, Solondz deliberately tweaks viewers, opening with a shot of college student Vi (Selma Blair) having energetic sex atop her partner Marcus (Leo Fitzpatrick), who is immediately shown to have cerebral palsy. Viewers who are familiar with Larry Clark’s twin provocations, Kids and Bully, will recognize the actor immediately; with his mouth twisted and his left arm clutched against his chest, Marcus comes across almost as a parody of a C.P. sufferer—but Solondz dares you to laugh. The character turns out to be sympathetic (though he’s a bad, shallow writer), and aware of his status as a novelty item. "The kinkiness is gone," he complains to Vi. "You’ve become kind." After they’ve broken up, Vi whines to her roommate about his immaturity. "I thought Marcus would be different. He’s got C.P.!"

In her pique, Vi picks up her Pulitzer Prize-winning creative-writing teacher in a bar, then goes home with him and has rough sex, which she turns into a story that she reads aloud in class. When her fellow students deride it as cliched, unbelievable, and maybe even racist, she finally cries in exasperation, "But it happened!" Her critics are unswayed, and her instructor responds cooly, "Once you start writing, it all becomes fiction." The teacher is played by Robert Wisdom, who invests his role as a sexual predator with credibility and even some degree of subtlety. (Incidentally, the version of Storytelling being shown in the U.S. blocks our view of the sex scene in question with a huge red box; that’s Solondz’ way of raising his middle finger to the MPAA, which gave the scene in question an NC-17 rating, and to Fine Line Features, which wouldn’t fund the movie unless Solondz guaranteed them an R.)

"Nonfiction" is less tightly focused, with Solondz allowing himself enough meandering room to take a potshot at American Beauty—a move that was inspired when Solondz heard that Sam Mendes thought Happiness was "condescending." Oxman eventually decides to title his film American Scooby, a dual reference to American Beauty and the documentary American Movie. (In fact, American Movie guitarist Mike Schank has a small role in Storytelling as Oxman’s cameraman.) The issue here is how a filmmaker treats his subjects, and whether it’s possible to make a movie with the best intentions yet still come across as condescending in the end.

The level of self-consciousness on display in Storytelling is overwhelming and ingratiating. Solondz couldn’t get away with it if he didn’t have such a way with actors. Particularly effective are John Goodman in a supporting role as Scooby’s hulking father (he may be a simple man, but when he declares, "We’re not suckers," you believe him) and Jonathan Osser as Scooby’s kid brother Mikey. If Storytelling hadn’t been completed before A.I. was released last summer, you could read Osser’s wide-eyed robot-child performance as a pitch-perfect response to Spielberg’s film—his emotional immaturity and complete lack of self-consciousness verge on the demonic, and he regards live-in maid Consuelo (Lupe Ontiveros, from Chuck and Buck) with cold insensitivity.

Also, this stuff remains pretty funny. Desperate for human companionship, Oxman places an awkward phone call to a high-school friend who couldn’t be less pleased to hear from him. (This guy is supposed to make documentaries that comment on the human condition?) "Are you still acting?" she asks. The practiced response, registering disappointment and apologia at the same time: "I kind of came to terms with myself." That doesn’t make me laugh because it helps me feel superior to the poor schlep on the screen; it makes me laugh because I recognize what he’s feeling.

But Storytelling is only partially successful. It’s both thoughtful and entertaining, which is good, but it contrives a little too vigorously to justify the level of ugliness on display. If his intention is to put a rigorous spin on certain stereotypes, he’s constructed too many cartoonishly rigid characters to get the job done. Compared to Welcome to the Dollhouse, an bitter attack on the public school system and the suburban ideal, and to Happiness, which was downright frightening in the depths of human experience that it plumbed, Storytelling is a lightweight exercise in self-examination.