In a summer of clones, Harvard Man is something rare and riveting: a wild ride that relies on more than special effects.

Adams sparkles with quick-mindedness and verbal agility. This is a worthy and underused talent.

The first half of this freewheeling comedy-drama finds Toback at his imaginative best. The second half sinks into silliness.

How can one man juggle two women, possible expulsion, Mafia baseball bats and the meaning of life, while on acid? This is the kind of question only a Toback film thinks to ask, let alone answer.

Toback's films deliver a lot of bang for the buck. He's one of the few serious and original directors who can mix group sex and talk of existentialism; a fast-paced basketball sequence cut with scenes of Mafia members plotting a hit; and an in-class philosophy lecture stylishly edited with Alan's memories of a contradictory in-bed discussion.

As with most of Toback's films, there are Big Ideas being bandied about that never quite coalesce, a failing that, this time at least, mirrors his hero's own hyped-out search for meaning.

Wildly uneven yet perversely coherent ode to the lure of sexual and chemical experimentation, the precariousness of sanity and the sheer suggestible power of paranoia.

Mr. Toback uses his improbable, conventional story as the trelliswork for a series of wild and florid riffs about sex, ethics and the delirium of renegade moviemaking.

The film suffers from clunky smart-aleck dialogue and an overabundance of jump cuts and crane shots, and despite its libertine air, Toback repeatedly cautions that acid is a fast track to insanity, especially in combination with Heidegger and Wittgenstein.

Sillier than it is clever, and Toback's self-indulgence is tiresome. He's a genuine auteur, all right, but his life and the funky tastes that inspire him are just not as interesting as he thinks they are.

A fast and clever con-gone-wrong comedy that reflects the writer-director's characteristic blend of the intellectual and the criminal. But it lacks anyone to care about--even the repellent characters are less than fascinating--and the result is a crisply made movie that is no more than mildly amusing.

Toback has taken a distinctly '60s-ish personal experience and done his best to transplant it into the current, vastly different, cultural milieu. Harvard Man is a semi-throwback, a reminiscence without nostalgia or sentimentality.

A characteristically engorged and sloppy coming-of-age movie from the filmmaker (''Harvard '66'') who, in his body of work, indulges his fantasies as fetishistically as other men finger their cigars.

The story's self-conscious seaminess cries out for the ministrations of a filmmaker like direct-to-video auteur Gregory Hippolyte.