OutKast never recycles.

Which is how you get an ambitious mess like Idlewild, the pop duo's big-screen debut. It's a fascinating example of the glass ceiling pop acts tend to splatter against when they try to "extend the brand" into movies. But as with the group itself, you never get the feeling that anyone is going through the motions; thankfully no one leaves well enough alone. You always recognize someone wondering how a scene or line of dialogue or costume could be done differently.

This is no fiasco.

No Glitter with Mariah Carey. No Whatever-Movie-Madonna-Would- Like-to-Act-in-Now.

But it looks a lot like one.

There's a thin line, after all, between a fiasco and a work of vision. Idlewild has an ache for the old South. It also yearns to move forward. It wants to connect the world of rap with the jazz era; there's a speakeasy bustling with chicken coops and flappers and rappers. It wants to show how the archetypes of the past bled into the archetypes of the present - the way hootch runners became businessmen, for example. And it's a reminder of the all-black cast pictures of the '20s and '30s. And it's a musical. A jitterbug transitions into break dancing - and why have a cuckoo clock rap when you can have a wall of rapping cuckoos?

I'm reminded of spectacles like Moulin Rouge, and not just because of the smoky back rooms and the costumes borrowed from Elton John, but because there's a good idea around every bend - and every single one of those smart ideas gets indulged then pulverized through an editing scheme that breaks up every lovely moment into a collage.

Which makes some sense.

Arguably the most forward-thinking hip-hop performers of the past decade - a decade so spotty you might have wondered if they were the only forward-thinkers in any category - the OutKast partners positioned themselves as poster children for the iPod Shuffle generation. Album to album, even song to song, they rarely sat still for a single style. Andre "Andre 3000" Benjamin was the eccentric one. Antwan "Big Boi" Patton was the smooth one. To the patriarchal world of rap, they were respected but freaks; to everyday listeners, they were a reaction to hip-hop monotony.

They took off in a big way.

But woe to a pop act with nothing left to prove. You've sold millions of records. Your concert tours overwhelm Ticketmaster operators. Bill Clinton mentions you on his Celebrity iTunes Play List. Awards pile up on the mantel - of your mansion in Lake Como, Italy. Critics genuflect, MTV programmers send your grandmother a fruit basket on her 90th birthday, and your line of sports jerseys just became a publicly traded entity.

Next step, Hollywood.

Turn back.

You have two options, neither great: Your first is to trade on your persona but take baby steps. Make Superstar X in an Underdog Drama Y (Eminem, 8 Mile) or Superstar X in a Road Comedy Y (Britney Spears, Crossroads). If it's a hit, you'll make that movie ad nauseam (see Elvis for fur-ther examples). If it's a miss, you have pinpointed your weakness.

The other option is to make the picture a natural outgrowth of your career. This will only work if your career is ambitious. For instance, the Beatles in A Hard Day's Night, later Prince movies, or Pink Floyd's The Wall. If it's a hit, you're a genius; and if it's a bomb, it's a career footnote (or at the least, a cult favorite).

Leave it to OutKast to locate a third way of doing things. Idlewild is both options splattered across a bursting, cluttered canvas, played all at once - the Jackson Pollock Option, in short. Or to bring up the Prince example again: It's a little Purple Rain and a lot Under the Cherry Moon - the gutsy, black-and-white art piece that spelled Prince's long day's journey from crossover genius to head-scratching genius.

Which is to say, Idlewild is exactly the movie you'd expect a group like OutKast to make and too much like the movie you'd never expect it to make: A dense, high-concept mash-up of styles and tones more ambitious and substantially conceived than the typical pop-star vehicle, dispiritedly joined with a typical romance and a typical in-trouble-with-gangsters flick.

By the way, that's gangsters.

Not gangstas.

Directed by Bryan Barber, the guy behind eye-poppingly surreal OutKast videos like "Hey Ya!," Idlewild takes place in Georgia in the 1930s. Not the real place but the nostalgic blues fantasy we have in our minds. Benjamin plays the house piano player of the nightclub Church; Patton plays the inheritor of the nightclub and therefore inheritor of the previous owner's gangland debt. There's a singer with big-city dreams (Paula Patton); a mortician father who wants his son to stay put (Ben Vereen); a crime boss (Ving Rhames); a last-minute cameo from Cicely Tyson; and the nastiest crime lackey of them all, played by the great Terrence Howard (stealing yet another film).

Smart cast, and like a lot about Idlewild - a waste. The musical numbers are rousing, if we could get a look at them; every move is so splintered in the editing room, nothing takes off. The sets are imaginative, if we could see them; shadows cover everything. Benjamin and Patton have been in movies before, as character actors; but Patton never opens up and the natural zing of Benjamin is undermined by pure mope and misplaced sentiment.

There's a larger problem.

For all the inventiveness and the guts, the stories never twine; the songs are insanely wrong for the scenes (though in a cult-flick way, perversely right); and worse yet, gangsters and hustlers and sensitive artists are not what we head to OutKast for. They're a reaction to those cliches. Not a conduit.

First Published August 25, 2006, 10:50 a.m.