BEING JOHN MALKOVICH @ 25

Craig is a self employed puppeteer married to Lotte who wants a baby and needs Craig to get a paying job. He does, at the bizarre business led by Dr Lester from the 7 1/2 floor of the Mertin-Flemmer business, winning the job for his nimbleness with his fingers which helps with filing. During his job induction he is immediately smitten by the beautiful and sassy Maxine. One day a folder he needs falls behind the cabinet and, moving the cabinet to retrieve it, he discovers a small door. It opens on to a tunnel which his curiosity cannot resist. Once in, he is suddenly propelled into the brain of John Malkovich. Craig is a passive observer of Malkovich's experience, seeing him read the newspaper and crunch on morning toast. After a few minutes, he is ejected and falls on a patch of grass on the New Jersey Turnpike. He tells Maxine about this, hoping to interest her in him. She immediately thinks business. The pair, with Lotte who is suddenly and mutually smitten with Maxine. That's all in the first half hour and I'm leaving things out.

Even less of it was in the trailer and every time I saw it or even recounted it to others, I'd laugh just at the ideas. 1999 was a year of game changing with the likes of The Matrix, Fight Club and the Blair Witch Project adding bold new approaches to narrative and film making that are still resonant. Being John Malkovich was the feature debut of writer Charlie Kaufmann and director Spike Jonez both of whom had had a very good '90s with noticeable tv jobs and some standout music videos. Kaufmann's ideas had led him to write his own screenplays for challenging source material like Phillip K. Dick, among others, favouring approaches with strong mind bending narratives. BJM began life as a love story. It's still that, just a very peculiar one.

The casting and its presentation were also key to this convoluted story's works. Teen star turned dramatic lead John Cusack uglied down for his depressing Craig, having a boyish enthusiasm that never gets to override his dowdiness. Catherine Keener, an indy star who usually played poignant characters with quiet intellect, is credibly inverted as the loud and sexy Maxine. Cameron Diaz, the decade's edgy sex pot is unrecognisable under an explosion of frizz and layers of jumpers and trackie dacks. And John Malkovich himself goes exponentially beyond sporting in the title role of the shell of celebrity who, when he is confronted with a feedback loop of identity plays everyone in a restaurant, reacts with the horror we realise it would create but hilariously.

The management of this, making extraordinary ideas acceptable, is about pacing and depth of performance as much as effects or technical film making. While there are hints by the second in the few introductory scenes they fall flat as quirk until the characters interact with real stakes, until the movie really kicks in, it feels like it could collapse under its own cuteness. This is why Cusack and Diaz have to look so plain and unlovable and communication at the office is so frustrating, we need to want to change everything to something, to anything else. So far, that's pretty standard for a rom com but Maxine's glamour is so toxic that the scheme cannot work without the first couple trying to break it. That is what forms the plot when it does start and then gets to the extent that it must be done through control of living third party. That and its drama and its comedy is why this film with its cosmos of tiny weird ideas still feels like a classically narrative movie: the strangeness isn't being smuggled in, it's the big loudly screeching exoskeleton on the surface.

When I saw this with friends at a cinema in 1999, I was as receptive as anyone around me in the dark to its weird ideas (that trailer really had done its work properly) and I was invaded by its near constant brilliance. We couldn't stop talking about it at drinks afterwards and it was one of the movies of that year that stayed with us. But then I found that I couldn't watch it a again. I'd start it and think I had to laugh out loud in those first few minutes which seemed to fall flat reliably. This effect went deep enough for me to shut it down and remember the first viewing and let it stay as funny as it had been. Watching it again for this anniversary review, I had to course through the whole thing and did. Yes, it not only works but if you start it dropping the expectations of a comedy, you'll get a lot more out of it.

Kaufmann and Jonez never quite repeated this triumph. Kaufmann found a match in Michel Gondry but Eternal Sunshine's melancholy rises too early and strongly to approach the genreless Being John Malkovich. Jonez has made a mass of music videos and perfectly good features but nothing as dizzying. The pair's second and so far final collaboration Adaptation is fine but should be allowed to be different. There's no great tragedy here. Being John Malkovich is an exalted one-off and would only be diminished by comparison as though every thing every artist did needs scrutiny for standards they didn't declare themselves. All I'll say to that is that Kaufmann's directorial debut had him plunge into the kind of feedback distortion that gave us the restaurant scene in Being John Malkovich but was presented unironically as a constantly unfolding despondency which turns two hours into what feels like four. But for this moment, surrounded by other great moments that formed one of mainstream cinema's best years.