If you're tired of Nicolaas Cage playing it safe as an emotionally placid action man in National Treasure sequels, and your fondest desire is that he would just go completely off the known acting grid again, have we got the movie for you. He's a flagrantly unhinged crackhead cop in director Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant, which is neither a sequel to or remake of Abel Ferrara's 1990s Bad Lieutenant... but why shouldn't this movie's incalculable nuttiness start with its very name?

In the opening stretch, Cage gets a promotion to lieutenant right about the time a doctor nonchalantly informs him that he's got an unspecificied back problem that will cause him "moderate to severe" pain the rest of his days. It's not clear whether he already had a drug problem, but he's soon not just popping Vicodin but stealing Oxycontin, cocaine, and crack, even doing a bit of heroin by mistake in his enthusiasm to snort or smoke anything white that isn't in a Morton's Salt container. A murder investigation serves mostly as a chance for him to ingratiate himself with drug lords to help pay off his massive debts, stay flush with blow, and keep up his visits with the world's most fantastically good-looking (and of course golden-hearted) hooker, Eva Mendes. He's bad.

But he's lovable, partly because his perpetually stooped-over posture reminds us of great Americans like Ed Sullivan and Richard Nixon. And the more crack he does, the more you want to party with him. Late in the film, he indulges in substance abuse with a deadly gangsta, and keeps erupting in unexpected gales of gaseous laughter in the fellow's face, a little like Jack Nicholson's famously gleeful guffaws as the Joker. It's exhilarating to see a major actor let go of the slightest restraints on screen, even as you have that "Uhhh, I don't know if you should be doing this" feeling as much for Cage as for his character.

Also letting himself go: Werner Herzog, who directs most of the proceedings in a straightforward, matter-of-fact, luridly entertaining, lowdown crime-film fashion (this is the Herzog film least likely to ever get tagged an "art film") but occasionally indulges in some flights of fancy. You get long takes of wild alligators and pet igunanas that are so closeup, they're nearly lizardly p.o.v. shots. Cage related this at a Q&A following the first Telluride screening: "Werner said, 'Nicolas, I must have three minutes of my iguanas in the movie. If I can't have my iguanas in the movie for three minutes, I will be so upset, I will never make another movie.'" He got his wish, including shots in which Cage and an iguana have an extended staredown.

I'm afraid to give away any spoilers, but since the film has no distribution deal for America yet, maybe it's not a sin to describe the most gloriously over-the-top scene: A drug dealer shoots a bookie dead, but Cage insists that the guy be shot one more time, because he can still see his soul dancing. Cut to a shot of the deceased bookie breakdancing, on his head, before having his soul killed as well. Needless to say, every line between good and bad filmmaking ideas and intentional and unintentional comedy gets crossed. Who knows whether it'll ever get any kind of rollout here, but it may go over like gangbusters in Europe, where the film is already pre-sold, and where we hear they like their Americans ugly.