What it doesn't depict is rock performance. There are no actual concert scenes, although there are groupies and limousines and a personal manager. Or perhaps there are concert scenes, and they're disguised as an extended portrait of a modern fascist dictator whose fans morph into an adoring populace. I don't believe this dictator is intended as a parallel to any obvious model like Hitler or Stalin; he seems more a fantasy of Britain's own National Socialists led by Oswald Mosley.

"Pink Floyd: The Wall" was written almost entirely by Roger Waters, the band's intellectual, self-analytical, sometimes tortured lead singer. Its central character, named Pink, is played by Bob Geldof, of all people, who could not be less like Pink. The credits say he is being "introduced." He's onscreen more than anyone else, goes through punishing scenes, and even sings at times, although this isn't a performance film but essentially a 95-minute music video. Geldof morphs through several standard rock star looks, all familiar from other stars: The big-haired sex god, the attractive leading man, the haunted neurotic, the cadaverous drug victim. In his most agonizing scene, he shaves off all his body hair in a bloody reprise of Scorsese's famous short "The Big Shave."

There's also a scene where he trashes a hotel room; he must have carefully studied the room destruction in "Citizen Kane." The scene involves a terrified groupie (Jenny Wright) who flees around the room and cowers behind furniture but inexplicably doesn't flee immediately into the corridor. More frightening is that although Pink narrowly misses her with a wine bottle and a piece of furniture, he doesn't seem really aware that she's there.

The girl is earlier portrayed as concerned about him, and rather sweet. That sets her aside from the other females in the movie. There is Pink's mother, so devastated by her husband's death in war that she becomes smothering and domineering toward her son. Then Pink's wife, alienated by his zombie-like disconnection from life, turning finally to an anti-war lecturer to cheat with a man who cares about something. These are both at least recognizable women. The most grotesque female figure in the film is created by Scarfe's animation.

This is a flower so gynecological that Georgia O'Keefe might have been appalled. The bloom seduces a male flower, ravishes him, plunders him, and ultimately devours him. Perhaps she reflects Pink's terror of castration. Scarfe distorts the flower into other shapes for disquieting transformations, as a dove becomes a screaming eagle and then a warplane, landscapes are devastated and walls and goose-stepping hammers march across the land.

As you have gathered, I'm not describing what we think of as a "musical." This is a bold, relentless visualization of Waters' despair. It incorporates a theme that resonates with British audiences, an educational system ruled by stern, kinky headmasters. The opera's most famous song becomes its best scene. As Parker visualizes "Another Brick in the Wall," students on a conveyor belt are fed into blades that extrude them as ground meat. In the process, the students lose their faces behind blank masks, which are seen again in the faces of the dictator's followers. Message: Education produces mindless creatures suitable as cannon fodder or the puppets of fascists. I gather Waters wasn't keen on attending the reunions of his old school.