Cameron Crowe movies are all rock and roll coming-of-age stories. The age of the coming-of-ager in question is a mere formality. Whether a pair of searching teenagers (“Say Anything”), a late twenty-something (“Jerry Maguire”), or a young version of Crowe himself (“Almost Famous”), his protagonists all wind up much wiser at the end of their heavily soundtracked journeys. They also end up happy, in most cases. Crowe knows how to hit that perfect note of bittersweet passage from innocence into experience, but he never sustains it long before his characters come to a happy conclusion. In his comedies, joy and sorrow, like a perfect pop record, can be played and replayed with a lift of the needle, and you don’t mind that neither emotion ever feels completely real.

With “Vanilla Sky” Crowe takes a stab at reaching the darker portions of a man’s life, to explore the one thing that doesn’t seem to exist in his previous work: real consequences for his hero’s actions. To achieve this, Crowe obviously felt he had to do something about his storytelling style. He has long been adept at transforming universal experiences into fresh vignettes that crackled with the individuality of his writing. There’s nothing terribly profound in any of his movies, but his stories come to life because he nails movie clichés with postmodern irony while simultaneously infusing them with the warmth that their original expression contained: old subjects, new spins. He’s marvelous at it, and for awhile in “Vanilla Sky” he does display his trademark acumen. As David falls in love with Sofia, you know it’s yet another case of boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, but Crowe hooks you with a mixture of offbeat dialogue and shots of Penelope Cruz’ disarming cover-girl smile.

The underused Jason Lee, as David’s friend Brian, tosses out a number of self-conscious jokes about his relationship with David that both acknowledge and undermine his conventional role in the movie as The Best Friend Who Will Eventually Tell The Hero The Truth About Himself. Kurt Russell makes a sly comment about how he’s playing the role of the investigator who will eventually draw out David’s secrets,but, eager to get to the truth, tells David, “I don’t have time for all that.” This sort of thing ends fairly quickly, however. The cute, well-observed, but occasionally cloying dialogue that ornament his other films is abandoned, replaced by a more realistic, not to say dull, narrative style. Crowe escapes his patented style, in other words (although he can’t resist his typically dense deployment of pop songs, ranging from the Stones to Radiohead).

As a more “serious” film, “Vanilla Sky” makes the grade, after a fashion. David is actually a fairly thinly-sketched character, unusually slight for a Crowe hero, but what’s there is enough to propel the story. David falls in love, makes a bad decision, pays for it, and has to live with the consequences of his choice, which ultimately prove fatal. The question that drives the film is, fatal for whom? Along the way Crowe leads you along David’s path, which veers between dreams and consciousness, subconscious projections and mind-splitting reality. The mask which David must wear is used brilliantly in the nightclub sequence, followed by his drunken argument with Brian. The mask itself is eerie, being a kind of “Friday The Thirteenth”-like device that knocks the film into the realm of symbolism, and as Cruise wigs out in the nightclub, and especially afterward, his sagging, disfigured face oscillates with his terrifyingly blank prosthetic in some of the best and most unsettling scenes in his career.

But Crowe can’t seem to hold the mask/subconscious theme together. There’s a Dorian Gray quality about the story, and then there isn’t. And then there is. Actually, the movie isn’t quite sure what to make of the mask, or David’s dream world. Crowe has read his Jung (“Memories, Dreams, Reflections” rests on the interrogation table in David’s cell), but attempt to read his symbol at your peril. In sum, though, the middle-that is, the portion of the movie after his night with Sofia, and before the twist comes-works in creating a need for us to find out the truth behind the mask. We slowly begin to understand how his mind is working, pushing us with a modicum of suspense toward the conclusion.

If “Dorian Gray” is brought to mind early on, the ending evokes that grandest of all ghostly visions of self-knowledge, “A Christmas Carol”. And here everything breaks down a little. Without giving away the film’s ending, there is nothing revealing in saying that the movie explains everything a little too neatly, a little too comprehensively. Almost nothing is left to the imagination in a conclusion that is effective in shaking up our conceptions of the film, like many great mind-bending tales, such as “The Sixth Sense” or “The Usual Suspects”, but the shaking-up is more of a tremor than an eight-point-oh. The ending is right out of the Twilight Zone, but has none of the snappy irony you’d expect from such a story. This is due in large part to the fact that David has the benefit of a full and sustained explanation from another key character, and that bleeds a good deal of the fun and mystery from the story; the dream symbolism, meanwhile, is completely chucked overboard. Crowe succeeds in escaping his style, as I mentioned, but not in one important sense: he’s just found another way of telling a conventional story. The lesson David learns can be succinctly expressed by a line from “Heathers”: “Now that you’re dead, what are you going to do with the rest of your life?” The ending is clever in its combination of a happy ending and a sad one, all wrapped in an ambiguous sheen, but somehow the whole exercise feels very ho-hum.

“Vanilla Sky” falls flat, also, because although Crowe’s change of style is a step forward for him as a filmmaker, the step is a wobbly one at best. The film is actually based on another film called “Abre Los Ojos” (“Open Your Eyes”, also a line used in the film at key points), and that might go some way in explaining why Crowe isn’t quite at home with this secondhand material. Though I haven’t seen the film on which it’s based, I can say that as a movie that captures on celluloid the interplay of dreams and the subconscious with our waking reality, “Vanilla Sky” suffers badly in comparison to other films of its ilk, such as this year’s “Mulholland Drive,” or another Tom Cruise movie in which he wears a significant mask, “Eyes Wide Shut”. The latter was an astonishingly rich treatment of a man’s dream life handled by a master of visual style. Unfortunately, Crowe is simply unable to construct the sort of imaginative, dynamic dreamscape that Kubrick pulled off so memorably. Films that explore dreams tend to be lush and stylish, full of that strange logic we have in our dreams where even the most realistic scenarios are not quite convincing enough if we take a good look around us. There are odd repetitions, impossible coincidences, and imperceptible shufflings of the principal players involved until suddenly we are shocked into the consciousness that we are in a dream. Movies, which parade images before us in a dreamlike process, are the ideal vehicles for depicting such experiences, but Crowe isn’t up to snuff. He lacks the wherewithal required to use the palette of dreams to decorate his canvas. “Vanilla Sky” reaches its destination-there are some interesting insights about personal choices and seizing control of life-but it trudges where it should fly. Earthbound, like David himself, it’s afraid of heights.