Joel David Moore and Max Minghella in "Art School Confidential"

“What you should be doing,” says teacher and struggling artist Sandy Sandiford (John Malkovich) to his student Jerome Platz (Max Minghella), “is experimenting. At your age you should try as many different things as you can.”

That seems to be the attitude with which Art School Confidential was made. Of course Sandy is actually trying to seduce his pupil, who ignores the oh-so-casual fingertips on his forearm and sets out to copy as many different genres as possible, all with wretched results.

It’s probably only a coincidence that the filmmakers fall into the same trap as their protagonist. But then again, maybe on a subconscious level they realized that they were in the same dilemma—the desire to live up to expectations and the impossibility of fleshing out an insufficient premise.

Art School Confidential was directed by Terry Zwigoff and written by Daniel Clowes, the same team that made the delightful Ghost World, starring Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson as high school misfits searching desperately for any alternative to college. That film had the benefit of springing from an ongoing body of work, Clowes’ series of alternative comic books.

This new film, by contrast, is cut almost entirely from whole cloth, based on a short comic Clowes published in 1991. That left him plenty of room to add characters and a story—neither of which is exactly his strong point.

Closer to Ghost World’s misfit-by-default Rebecca than its genuinely off-center Enid, Jerome is a slightly built high schooler whose talent for sketching is no help in attracting any of the girls he fancies, all of whom are to be found on the arms of jocks. He sees art school as a way of bringing his talents to a world predisposed to appreciate them, or at the very least a way to meet nude models.

The film meanders for awhile as a sort of Animal House Goes to Art School. The students are doing nothing but learning a better vocabulary to voice their innate pretensions, while the teachers go through the motions of trying to prepare their charges for a world that will make a place for less than one percent of them (and probably not the deserving one percent, either).

This first half of the film has its moments with stale but serviceable gags about student foibles. (I enjoyed the buffet table at the student exhibition.) It doesn’t take long, though, before it starts leaving a bad taste in your mouth. I can only assume that Clowes has some college experience, because the tone is awfully bitter. Like the relentlessly crude profanity that litters the dialogue, it’s more grating than amusing. It certainly doesn’t score any new points about the pretensions of art school (recently skewered with more finesse by HBO’s “Six Feet Under”).

Learning that talent is less important than perception, Jerome struggles not to do the best he can but to grind out work that will impress his classmates and professors. He starts to resemble Walter Paisley, the schlmeil hero of Roger Corman’s horror comedy A Bucket of Blood, who covers corpses in clay and passes them off as sculptures at the beatnik coffeehouse where he works as a busboy. That may not be an unintended reference, as Art School Confidential takes a third act lurch into dark comedy with a subplot involving a strangler preying on local students.

In between Ghost World and this, director Zwigoff scored an unexpected hit with Bad Santa, a misanthropic comedy that almost never pulled its punches. Art School Confidential at times seems to want to go in that direction, but doesn’t have the legs for it. Despite some scattered laughs, it’s mostly an aimless mess of clichéd characters and underdeveloped ideas.