Zonked out of her mind

“I never really wanted to make a stoner movie,” said Gregg Araki, whose new film, the hilarious and endlessly inventive “Smiley Face,” sets a new high-water mark for the stoner genre.

“Smiley Face,” which screens Saturday and Sunday at AFI Fest and receives a limited run Nov. 16-22 at the NuArt, chronicles an eventful day in the life of aspiring actress and adorable pothead Jane (Anna Faris). Overcome by the munchies one morning, she polishes off her roommate’s entire tray of cupcakes, only to realize that they were herbally enhanced. For the remainder of the movie, our heroine, zonked to the point of incapacitation, proceeds through a list of everyday activities -- she takes the bus, attends an audition, pays her dealer, replaces the baked goods -- that seem increasingly daunting and complicated.

Although Araki admits over coffee in West Hollywood that he’s not an avowed fan of the genre, when he read the “Smiley Face” script by Dylan Haggerty (a sometime actor and first-time feature screenwriter), it struck a chord. “I have friends like Jane, and I remember thinking it would be the kind of film they’d be obsessed with,” he said.

Its female protagonist instantly sets “Smiley Face” apart from its stoner brethren. The script also had a crucial quality for a reefer odyssey -- what Araki called a “wonderful randomness.” To get a full extent of the film’s eccentricity, consider that Haggerty’s script bore the working title “The ‘Being John Malkovich’ of All Pot-Smoking Stoner Movies.”

When it came to casting, Araki said, he was dead set on Faris, the star of the “Scary Movie” franchise who has stood out in film after film despite being repeatedly typecast as a ditzy blond. “I was looking for that person who’s the scene-stealer that you wish was in the movie more,” he said, citing her all-too-brief appearance as a painfully vapid actress in “Lost in Translation.”

As if to compensate, Faris is almost never off-screen in “Smiley Face.” “She makes it look deceptively easy,” Araki said of his star. At Sundance, where the film premiered in January, “people were like, ‘Oh, she’s just stoned the whole movie.’ But technically it’s a really difficult performance. There are all these nuances to her stoned-ness, like sometimes she’s dazed and sometimes she’s hyper. There are all these peaks and valleys.” He went so far as to compare her to Carole Lombard: “She’s really beautiful but has this incredible ability and timing.”

A key figure of the New Queer Cinema of the early ‘90s, Araki came to prominence with the pop-nihilist manifestoes “The Doom Generation,” “The Living End” and “Totally F***ed Up,” notable for their polymorphous perversity and sloganeering wit. He has mellowed somewhat in recent years. His previous movie, “Mysterious Skin” (2004), a tender, unflinching portrait of child abuse based on a novel by Scott Heim, was his first not to originate from his material. It was also, in the estimation of many critics, his best and most mature film.

Araki sees a continuity between his current work and his enfant-terrible days. “ ‘Smiley Face’ is obviously not an overtly political movie,” he said. “But like ‘Mysterious Skin,’ thematically it weirdly fits in with a lot of my other movies, in the sense they’ve always been about outsiders.”

Although it is quite obviously the most commercial film he has made, “Smiley Face” has run into snags on the distribution front. The film was picked up after Sundance by independent distributor First Look, which was acquired by another indie, Nu Image, in March.

For a while it appeared that “Smiley Face” was headed for a straight-to-DVD release. Even now, the sole theatrical run planned is the single week in Los Angeles, though First Look’s executive vice president of distribution Andy Gruenberg said that plans could change. “We’ll see how it performs open- ing weekend and go from there.”

Given its considerable cult potential, “Smiley Face” should have a healthy life on DVD, but it’s also a perfect film for what Araki called the “communal participation” of movie houses. At the Sundance midnight screening, Jane’s paranoid disposal of her stash elicited a collective gasp of horror from the audience. The movie already has turned out to be one of Araki’s most popular -- it has traveled widely on the festival circuit and was the director’s first film to screen at Cannes.

With a laugh, Araki said, “There are stoners all over the world.”