Like Woody Allen, director Alan Rudolph has never had any problem attracting established actors, despite his low budgets. The beginnings of his credibility go back to his work as assistant to Robert Altman on "The Long Goodbye", "California Split" and "Nashville" before creating the own distinctive, haunting mood-pieces "Welcome to LA", "Remember My Name" and "Choose Me". At best, creating the sense of a dream out of shifting reality, as worst downright pretentious, Rudolph has now opted to shoot the unshootable in "Breakfast of Champions", a novel straight from the strange canon of Kurt Vonnegut.

The whole point of Vonnegut is his highly-developed, unique use of language. The whole point of cinema is that it is a much more literal medium. Rarely do the twain meet successfully. Thus "Breakfast of Champions" is like a house without foundations, a semblance of something that is powerful, magnetic and eccentric. Because narrative oomph is unimportant to Vonnegut, Rudolph had only managed to come up with a loose mix of scenes, some of which at least cannot help but be memorable. This is the story of Dwayne Hoover (Bruce Willis), who is a big shot in a characterless Midwestern pass-through town, the owner of a car-dealership run by Harry (Nick Nolte), an oddball with a taste for wearing women's undies. Dwayne also entertains notions of suicide, has a wife (Barbara Hershey) who enjoys tranquillisers, and a life about to be upended by the arrival of Kilgore Trout (Albert Finney), a seriously untalented writer of sci-fi. At least all the actors seem to take pleasure in the weirdness of the material, adapted from a book that should never have been taken off the shelf in the first place.