It's newcomer Helena Howard, as Madeline, who gives an utterly mesmerizing, star-making performance.

An enthused and compelling take on mental disorder fetishism and power roles, Madeline's Madeline is so full of wonderful ideas that its protagonist's headspace seems barren in comparison.

This is a woozily shot, dislocating experience that in its best moments generates the sort of tense mental anxiety that Lynne Ramsay has made her calling card.

Anyone who has ever taken an acting class and witnessed the psychodramas brewed there will relate to this bubbling kettle of raw, unleashed emotions stirred up in shifting power grabs.

At once intimidatingly dense and breezily concise, uncompromisingly experimental and riotously entertaining.

[Helena Howard] is the center spectacle, and the movie plays like a fever dream inside her new, fascinating mind.

All I can safely assert after one viewing is this: Decker and Howard are formidable talents, and Madeline's Madeline is a must for anyone who cares about the future of this medium.

The narrative might be shattered, but the film's slipstream of emotion is powerful and inescapable.

A drama of boundless spontaneity as Decker deftly examines mental illness and the potentially exploitative lines a performer may cross when pulling life into art.

A drama of furious disconnection, a cinematic gear-grinding of a working-class family of modest means who seem hardly at home in their own neighborhood and are relentlessly abraded by contact with the deceptively welcoming milieu of art.

"Madeline's Madeline" is certainly not for everyone, and while that might not sound like a ringing endorsement, it's solicited in the context that the film is an experience that will test some viewer's patience, as all good art often does.

This is one of the boldest and most invigorating American films of the 21st century.

Among this year's coming-of-age films, it's got to be one of the most original. But it's also one of the more perplexing.