In Roger Dodger, first-time writer-director Dylan Kidd conjures a torrential outpouring of wit from a character who can connect with people only by handing down mock wisdom and real malice. The result is an American Angry Young Man picture: a Look Back in Anger for the Manhattan singles-bar scene. Experiencing this film is like hurtling down a verbal slalom.

Roger (Campbell Scott), nicknamed Dodger in childhood because he could talk his way out of trouble, is the perfect ad copywriter. And he's too slick to live. Not even his amused, semi-admiring agency chief (Isabella Rosselini), who occasionally shares a bed with him, can trust him. When he invades her apartment one night, after copying her room key, she quietly breaks off their sexual exchange (hardly a romance). It cuts him to the quick. We know him well enough by then to feel a full measure of foreboding when he filches one of her designer scarfs.

Roger is a frog king hopping from one watering-hole to another, but no enchanted beauty will ever turn him into a human prince. He's too resolute in his cynicism - indeed, his command of the sweeping putdown is part of his paradoxical charm.

In the breathtaking opening scene, he regales a group of co-workers, including his boss and secret (soon to be ex-) lover, with his notion that men will become obsolete as soon as women can move heavy furniture with telepathy. (The reasons: advances in birth control and in female sexual gratification.)

Roger's style is as important as his message. He cheerfully stuns his listeners with effortless outrageousness. Then he involves them in a corrupt sort of Socratic give and take, twisting any objection into yet another proof of his theory. Only a swift, surgical act, like Rosselini severing their relationship, can give him pause. And then not for long.

To put this character over, Kidd needed a performer as mellifluous as he is mentally quick, and with enough emotional depth to convey the anxiety beneath the coruscating rhetoric. Kidd found him in Scott, long a solid actor and here a great one. To watch him as Roger, telling one woman after another why a crush or even an engagement is a sick reflection of some buried psychic hurt, is to see an actor at the summit of his powers enacting a man at the manic end of his tether. Kidd's bit of brilliance is to suggest that women may welcome Roger's shows of "honesty," as if they've finally found a man smart and bold enough to speak the truth. The movie's honesty rests on its observation that Roger's proud reductionism of people to psychological foibles is itself a spiffy new defense mechanism. Roger may put down women as sponges for glossy psychobabble from the pages of Vanity Fair, but most of his insights come from the same slick source.

When his nephew Nick (Jesse Eisenberg) from Ohio unexpectedly turns up in his cubicle, Roger explains that he's in the business of making people feel unhappy or inadequate so they'll buy the products he peddles. He applies the same principles to the dating game, not realizing that women sense he's the one who is needy or unhappy. Most of the movie takes place in a long night's journey into morning, as Roger tries, at Nick's request, to initiate his nephew into the world of sex and dating. The set-up is more conventional than Kidd's lead character - we know the women they meet will find Nick's emotional transparency more endearing than Roger's virtuoso glibness.

But Kidd doesn't overplay his hand by giving Nick lightning strokes of perception. And Kidd's performers keep their group chemistry valid. Eisenberg is becomingly modest - he does a beautiful job of playing hope and chagrin - and Jennifer Beals and Elizabeth Berkley are a revelation as the two girlfriends who mark some time with Nick and Roger. They share a deep-seated rapport that contrasts wonderfully with Roger and Nick's antagonism, and their displays of common sense and frankness can make you crazy at how casually Hollywood underuses or outright trashes actresses like Beals and Berkley.

Roger Dodger is a small movie with little visual dimension. Most of Hollywood's big glamour machines, though, play the same hyped sadness-and-gladness game as Roger's form of advertising. Kidd, by contrast, leaves you feeling purged and oddly happy.

Roger Dodger

Starring Campbell Scott

Directed by Dylan Kidd

Released by Artisan

Rated R

Time 105 minutes

Sun Score * * * 1/2