A new work by director Wim Wenders is always cause for celebration, even if you’re not exactly sure why. Meditative, thought provoking, infuriating, masterful, the filmmaker’s body of work is as head-scratching as it is impressive, Wenders constantly walking a line between banality and brilliance every time he steps behind the camera. He connects (“Paris, Texas,” “Wings of Desire,” “The State of Things,” “The Buena Vista Social Club”) far more often then his misses (“The Million Dollar Hotel,” “Faraway, So Close”), but either way his movies are seldom easy to classify, many drifting aimlessly from theme to them until finally revealing a powerfully hidden meaning unnoticed by the ethereal dreamscape the director so often loves to create.

Such is the case with his latest, the seemingly obvious and straight-forward character study “Don’t Come Knocking.” Working from a screenplay by playwright and character actor Sam Shepard (and from a story the two co-wrote), on the surface this is another transparent tale of an aging celebrity coming to grips with his own mortality and the debauched choices he has made during his lifetime. It is a setup screaming of familiarity, yet under Wender’s firm yet graceful grip it becomes so much more than this simple story line, subtly morphing into an elegiac drama of small town Americana and the decisions that shape a person’s life.

Howard Spence (Shepard) once was a big star. He’s not anymore, old age and stereotyping taking their toll upon a once-electrifying career. Now, working on a low budget Western in the middle of the Nevada desert, the actor wakes up after a night of intemperance and has a moment of empty epiphany. Putting on his cowboy duds and saddling up his horse, he rides off into the morning sunshine hoping to disappear.

Not sure what it is exactly he is looking for, Howard heads to Elko, Nevada to camp out with his 80-year-old mother (Eva Marie Saint, looking and sounding as fantastic as ever). Mom hasn’t heard from, let alone seen, her son in years, but she can tell right away the boy’s on the verge of a gigantic nervous breakdown. Maybe this feeling in regards to his mental well-being is why she does it, but suddenly this velvety smooth elderly woman decides now is the right time to tell Howard of a phone call she got twenty years ago from a woman living in Butte, Montana.

This conversation rocks Howard, the aging superstar deciding to take a trip back to the town he made his name in two decades earlier. There he crosses paths with an old flame (Jessica Lange) running a local greasy spoon, her singer-songwriter son (Gabriel Mann) and a mysterious young girl named Sky (Sarah Polley) who appears to be tracking every move he makes as he walks through the town. Tracking the actor is a dogged private detective, hired by the insurance company responsible for the film Howard mysteriously left in the lurch without a star. He doesn’t care what the man is searching for, the investigator’s only want to get him back to Nevada before his employer loses any more money on a production crew sitting there twiddling their collective thumbs.

Don’t expect big themes or big ideas here. This isn’t “Wings of Desire” or “Paris, Texas,” Wenders and Shepard clearly going for something akin to melancholic whimsy than an all-inclusive life-as-we-know-it kind of denouement. But that doesn’t make “Don’t Come Knocking” either a trifle or a throwaway. There are moments here; Howard’s opening escape into the desert, a serene hilltop eulogy, a street side conversation between Sky and Howard on a disheveled couch, an explosive curbside showdown between former lovers; that jarred my senses and commanded my attentions. While the film on the whole is a quiet, almost otherworldly enterprise, it ultimately achieves a majesty that’s completely unexpected, Howard’s journey a far more touching and affecting one that I’d have thought back when it begun.

Still, this isn’t Wenders at his best. Mann is terribly miscast, his annoying delinquent so obtrusive and imbecilic I couldn’t help but wish he’d pack up his belongings and disappear about the midway point. It also took me a while to get in tune with the episodic nature of Shepard’s screenplay, the whole thing playing more like mini vignettes that parts of an entire two hour motion picture. And, as good as the majority of the actors are – and in the case of Polley and Lange they are excellent – there is still a distancing between them and the audience that’s difficult for Wenders to overcome.

But I liked this movie, by the end liked it a lot. I was moved, left both shaken and elated by the turn of events which brought all these disparate characters together. Wenders caught me up in his poetic polemic, kept me wanting to see what was going to happen next. I was, to but it bluntly, mesmerized, and that in and of itself is enough to make any critic happy. “Don’t Come Knocking” may not be the director at his best, but it is still darn good, and that alone should be enough to make even the pickiest filmgoer tip their hat.