Drifting through life in an insomniac stupor -- in which, as he remarks, "everything is a copy of a copy" -- the narrator furnishes his condo in upper-Ikea good taste but spends much of his time in planes and airport hotels, where everything comes in a "single serving," including human contact. He's so starved for emotional release he begins attending New Agey support groups for diseases he doesn't have, where it's acceptable to hug strangers and cry at random. His only friend is a man named Bob (played by the beefy singer Meat Loaf) from the testicular cancer group, who has developed "bitch tits" as well as losing his wife, his career and his balls. "Fight Club" is so promiscuous with its ideas, themes and images that it can go from flashes of genuine insight to laborious satire and back again within a few seconds. If the bitter recovery-movement parody often seems mean-spirited and a little outdated, the anguish felt by Bob, the narrator and other characters is no less real for it. You won't soon forget the scene where a woman suffering from cancer begs for a sex partner -- and no one responds.

Hollow-eyed and a little stoop-shouldered, Norton remains an almost detached presence at the center of "Fight Club" even as the imagistic whirl around him gets crazier and crazier. First the narrator meets a fellow support-group tourist named Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), a damaged, chain-smoking hag who looks like a new wave singer, circa 1985. Then he returns from a business trip -- he works for a major carmaker, traveling the country to view the accidents produced by his company's shoddy manufacturing -- to find that his condo has been blown up in a mysterious accident. With nowhere to go, he calls Tyler, a "single-serving" friend he just met on an airplane. Despite dressing like Huggy Bear, Tyler claims he makes and sells an expensive boutique soap. Before long, Tyler, Marla and the narrator are essentially cohabiting in Tyler's massive, dilapidated squat "in the toxic-waste part of town." Tyler and Marla bang like lunatics, while Tyler and the narrator seek access to their inner hooligans by launching an after-hours bare-knuckle boxing society they call Fight Club.

There isn't a lot more I can tell you about the narrator-Tyler-Marla triangle without giving away this tangled and far-too-long movie's secrets, but by this point I was too exhausted to care whether the plot made any sense anyway. Let's just say alert viewers may figure out that the trio's relations are not quite what they seem on the surface. Tyler beats and is beaten, reveals the horrific secret behind his soap, practices a form of "human sacrifice" and delivers lectures on his philosophy of "no fear, no distractions" and on the virtues of hitting bottom. Eventually the Fight Club membership morphs into Tyler's cult-like private army, and the late-night brawls progress into anti-corporate vandalism and even bombing campaigns. Initially fascinated, the narrator finally tries to break away from Tyler's circle, and finds himself running for his life clad only in boxer shorts and a raincoat, after nearly being castrated by pro-Tyler cops.

Like Fincher's highly influential "Seven," "Fight Club" is set in a nameless, unidentifiable American city -- there are some clues suggesting it may be Philadelphia or Wilmington, Del., -- that owes more to film noir, "Blade Runner" and the urban decay of the early '80s than to contemporary reality. Fincher's version of America is a dream world without suburbs, shopping malls, real women (for all Bonham Carter's actorly ability, Marla is a cartoon slut) or more than a handful of dark-skinned men. "Fight Club" is a distinctively dense and often hilarious film, but in the end it's nonsense. Tyler's scheme to liberate American manhood by destroying the credit-card companies -- although it's certainly not a bad idea -- is no more legitimate than the spectacle of the gym-buff Pitt critiquing the Tommy Hilfiger model of masculinity. There's a rich and familiar odor emanating from this movie, but it's not the smell of soap.

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