There’s nothing like a great mix tape. You know the kind, filled with that eclectic jumble of music swinging from one style and genre to another with crazy abandon. Rock, Country, Pop, Classical, Show Tunes, Rap; they’re all at home on the right mix tape, each folding into the other with the assured love and care of the person who took the time and effort to bring it all together.

Some of these compilations are an enigma, complex puzzle boxes that don’t remotely make sense until they’ve been played a half dozen times or more. They’re strange, a little off-center, and by the time you’ve finished with it the first time you’re not even remotely sure what the heck it was you just listened to. But then, usually by that fifth or sixth listen, the tape starts to come alive, ingraining itself so deeply it ends up nestling right next to your very soul. When I made mix tapes – and yes, I really was just that big a geek – those were the kind my friends accused me of making, and to be perfectly honest the fact that many of them are still listened to today really makes me smile.

Cameron Crowe’s new movie “Elizabethtown” is this kind of mix tape. In this digital age (and it’s actually cd’s that are used in the film which, to me at least, feels a bit odd), it’s rare to find a filmmaker so obsessed with the lyrical intricacies and contradictions inherent in a person’s life. Such a filmmaker is Crowe, and after classics “Say Anything” and “Almost Famous,” a surreal mind trip in “Vanilla Sky” and blissfully sweet romances “Singles” and “Jerry Maguire,” it is interesting to see him travel in such an intimately odd direction. The movie is a mess, of course; an ecstatically unaware mess so full of passion and love and life and heartbreak and whimsy (maybe too much whimsy) it doesn’t even notice how big a mess it really is.

Or does it? At one point, one of Crowe’s characters asks, “What is the difference between a failure and fiasco?” The answer it comes up with may or may not hold water depending upon your point of view, but the question is still a good one. More importantly, with “Elizabethtown,” much like “Vanilla Sky,” Crowe is not risking failure, he’s risking a fiasco, and that’s fantastic. Life’s greatest moments usually come when a person risks looking like an idiot. Asking that girl to marry you. Speaking up with a strange idea during a business meeting. Putting chords together in a song that are diametrically opposed to one another. Putting aside your shyness and trying for the lead in the school play.

This is Cameron Crowe’s new feature. That is what he is trying to accomplish. “Elizabethtown” isn’t a drama, it isn’t a comedy, it’s not even a romance. “Elizabethtown” is life, and, as such, it is seldom a smooth ride.

But it is it any good? That is the million – or in this case billion – dollar question. In all honesty, I’m not entirely sure. Like those aforementioned mix tapes I need to see it again, probably more than once, to get a true feel for where my feelings lie. Unlike any of Crowe’s prior work, including the fractured-yet-intoxicating “Singles,” this is an astonishingly bumpy road trip. No matter how you look at it, there are pieces here and there that simply do not fit or make sense. And yet, few other movies this year have moved me more, brought me to tears so deeply like this one, tapping so intimately with the absurdly tangled inner workings of my own heart I’m almost at a loss of words.

Okay, I’ll admit right now Orlando Bloom is incapable of carrying this (Jack Lemon or Cary Grant he’s not), completely out of his depth at trying to piece together all the Byzantine layers buried within Crowe’s script. I’ll also say that certain moments, like Susan Sarandon’s out-of-nowhere tap dance or a children’s video depicting a home demolition, are almost too absurd and nonsensical to ever be taken seriously. Some of the supporting performances (most notably Jed Rees, who’s almost unbearable) are far too broad, and, especially early on, Crowe pushes the whimsical aspects (Bloom’s suicide attempt is especially ludicrous) much to hard.

But then there is Kirsten Dunst, so elegantly effervescent and luminously beatific it’s hard to describe her. I also simply adored a late night phone call between strangers that slowly morphs into a magical roadside meeting between friends at sunrise, so emotional the tears it produces are almost like a sublime kick to the stomach. Then there is an indoor thunderstorm struck to the guitar drive of Freebird, a cacophony of lunacy and emotion so surreal and gut-bustingly hilarious Crowe’s mentor Billy Wilder would be proud.

I haven’t talked about plot and I’m not going to. “Elizabethtown” isn’t about plot (Bloom is a failed shoe designer who must go to Kentucky to retrieve the body of his dead father, whimsically strangle adventures of the heart ensue); it’s about life and the inane absurdities and coincidences that make living it special. It’s Crowe’s most personal work since “Almost Famous,” and you can feel the writer-director’s sweat on each and every frame.

But is it worth the effort? At the moment, I’m going to nudge towards a slightly hesitant yes and leave it at that. The version I saw this week is different than the unfinished 140 minute cut that played both Toronto and Venice, so I can’t comment about the decidedly mixed reaction that happened there. Absent almost half an hour, this final cut of the movie still feels jittery and unsure of itself from time to time, like an unfinished album searching for that final track to bring it all together. Yet, when it sings, it soars, a driving dreamy aria I could talk about for days.

By the time Crowe faded things out I couldn’t say he blew me away like he has in the past or completely won me over as I was hoping; the movie is too ragged, too fragmented, too capriciously bizarre to be totally successful. But it isn’t a waste, not by a long shot, and like the most eccentric works of Wilder, Truffaut or Buñuel after a few repeat viewings it’s entirely likely “Elizabethtown” could turn into a classic. Sure I don’t buy that a company would bet everything on a new shoe designed by an untested employee. Of course a cross-country flight from Portland to Louisville with only two passengers is idiotic. I don’t care. Crowe isn’t concerned with the certainties, he’s after the essence, and finding the little quirks and creases in life’s staid patterns is exactly what he’s searching for.

Crowe, no stranger to music, knows how to groove in alternating directions at any given moment and that’s exactly what’s going on here. Like the best mix, the filmmaker touches all genres, all styles, shifting gears one to the other with fearless abandon. It isn’t easy, and it doesn’t always work, and it certainly isn’t always pretty, but taken as a whole “Elizabethtown” is intoxicating. I can’t help but think, the vibe it generates, the mood it creates, is only going to get better with time.

Just like the right mix tape.