DAYS OF BEING Wild was the first collaboration between mainland-born Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai and cinematographer Christopher Doyle, an Australian who's worked mostly in Southeast Asia. Credit for a movie's general tenor and artistry usually goes directly to the person yelling, "Cut!" but in this case, a central partnership renders single authorship pretty irrelevant.

Wong and Doyle have made eight features together; I don't think I want to know how the former would do without the latter. A useful parallel might be drawn to the long (but now terminated) working relationship between Bernardo Bertolucci and his camera guy Vittorio Storaro – separated from each other, their work has almost invariably been diminished.

Its original title translating as Story of Rebellious Youth – the same name given Rebel Without a Cause in Hong Kong, not coincidentally – Days of Being Wild both kick-started and stalled the Wong-Doyle association when it came out in 1991. (The current, restored-new-print rerelease is the film's first official U.S. theatrical run.) Art school dropout Wong had carved out a successful career as a scenarist for comedies and martial arts flicks before he was allowed to direct one of his own screenplays, 1988's gangster hit As Tears Go By. Doyle had made a splash photographing his first three H.K. films, notably the Tony Leung tragic-hero classic My Heart Is That Eternal Rose.

Days was thus put together with high expectations, plus a cast led by six hugely popular local pop stars-cum-actors. Critical response was admiring (especially abroad), if not always adulatory. But the public, as they say, stayed away in droves. The primary reason: it was, well, boring.

Looked at now as the real birth of Wong and Doyle's signature style – languorous yet unpredictable, steeped in romantic fatalism, visually overpowering, almost indifferent to narrative – it's easy to appreciate Days as more than a beautiful package that just sits there. All essential elements of their collaboration are here, if not yet in fully matured form. Each successive film would refine and further their adventurous technique until it reached its apotheosis (to date) in 1997's Happy Together.

Days of Being Wild hasn't become dated, its gorgeous, assured high-art approach to pulp material floating free from any particular cinematic period. It's an invaluable piece of a sometimes somewhat-puzzling oeuvre. And yeah – it's still a little boring. Insolent and dapper – more Alain Delon than James Dean – Yuddy (the late Leslie Cheung) is a narcissistic young layabout living in his own private Jim Thompson novel. He lives off a foster-mother "auntie" (Tina Muñoz), an aging tart who refuses to say who his biological parents are, only that they abandoned him as a babe. That fact, along with their love-hate domesticity, has shaped Yuddy's self-conscious delinquent glamour, as well as an approach to women that's all headlong conquest followed by cold distance.

It's a program that finds an ideal chump in bartender So Lai-chun (Maggie Cheung), a woman whose resistance to being seduced only makes her fall more calamitous. Yuddy's approach is insinuating, almost supernatural: entering with deus-ex-machina authority, he announces, "You'll see me in your dreams tonight." Yet once she's hooked, he throws her out as casually as a fisherman tossing back an unwanted catch; the blow almost destroys her.

Yuddy has already moved on to Mimi (Carina Lau), a showgirl as flashy and shrill as Lai-chun is modest and shy. As their combative relationship runs its course, Lai-chun finds platonic solace in night-shift policeman Tide (Andy Lau), while Yuddy's hapless best friend, Zeb (Jacky Cheung), pines impossibly for Mimi. This chain of unrequited loves jumps a few links in the third act, when several fates take hazy shape during a sojourn to the Philippines.

Days of Being Wild – a title that promises a lot more energy than gets delivered – shuffles dominant points of view like a short deck of cards, focusing for a time on Yuddy's hostile misery, then on those he makes miserable, then back again. Wong says he chose a 1960 setting because that was "the beginning of a decade, a prelude to the sixties – the sun was brighter, the air fresher – it felt so good."

But as with In the Mood for Love, his international hit 12 years later, Doyle's creamy compositions and exquisite color coordination create a dream bubble hermetically sealed off from any historical backdrop. Night and rain are never-ending, characters stunned still by their emotional wounds. Frequent blasts of exotica music only underline their isolation, the lack of escape in escapism itself. When a couple instances of violent action arrive near the end, it's as though you've been jarred awake to find the movie you were watching has been replaced by another one.

This film's picked melancholy and fetishization of cool – Yuddy, like Belmondo in Breathless, seems formed from the smoke exhaled by noir antiheroes – are at once hypnotic and overly formalized, a series of gestures too rarefied for vulgar explication.

Wong and Doyle are just in the middle of their careers. Their work together has been unique (particularly in its Hong Kong cinema context), yet there's still a sense of waiting for something to finally click in place. Great filmmaking is seldom "perfect." Wong and Doyle, however, are interesting in that what was striking and flawed about Days has pretty much remained constant in their work through 15 subsequent years. Which by now may be cause for worry. 'Days of Being Wild' opens Fri/25 in Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock for show times.