No American director would or could have made Pink Floyd The Wall (Empire, AA). It is simply not the sort of project the Spielbergs, Scorseses and Coppolas would interest themselves in. Which is a very good reason why people like Alan Parker should exist, even if his collaborators on this extraordinary film, Roger Waters of Pink Floyd and Gerald Scarfe, the artist, found his conception of it different to their own. At least something exists on celluloid, and millions who bought the album will see it.

The tensions between Parker, Waters and Scarfe have been well advertised, mostly by Parker. But he obviously doesn’t think they have resulted in a botch-up, and nor do I. I found the album inflated, uneven but still quite something and that’s exactly what the film is. Except that, as a piece of pure cinematic technique, it is touched with an originality of expression and a thunderous conviction that lifts it a little beyond what is was as simply as aural tour de force. Perhaps tension is sometimes a good thing to have around.

A poster of the film. Photograph: Alamy

There is, of course, a reason why few Americans would touch it. There are virtually no words, there is no conventional narrative and the whole thing exists as a series of images, linked to a theme of manic breakdown. A rock star sits mute, except for the occasional scream, in his hotel suite somewhere in Los Angeles. The television is permanently on, and his eyes watch it almost sightlessly. He remembers his father, killed at Anzio, his suffocating mother, his childhood sweetheart whom he married and who then fell for someone else.

Finally broken by the melange of memories, and by a lifestyle that has successfully erected an impenetrable wall between him and any kind of tangible reality, he imagines himself a rock ’n roll Great Dictator, strutting in front of a ghoulish skinhead audience. A kind of affirmative ending suggests that perhaps he will break down the wall and start to live again.

A fire scene from the film. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

All this is not actually desperately original. Pink (Bob Geldof, impersonating Waters himself, who was writing from hard experience) is so familiar a figure from rock’s drugged and drooling past that the moment when he flings the telly set through the window only gives one a sharp sense of deja vu. But if Parker’s masterstrokes sometimes alienate rather than proving very much about alienation, his smaller visions, amply detailed by the camera, seem remarkably real. And the concert that is really the film’s finale, the natural summation of Pink’s neurosis, is as powerfully filmed as anything in Tommy, the other British success in this area.

Above all, Parker’s visual synthesis with the music, much aided by Scarfe’s rip-roaring visions of doom and destruction which turn light into darkness at the flick of a pen rather than a switch, is almost perfect. He has got rhythm all right, and if you want to know how to cut a film to it, watch this one. It is a very carefully constructed shambles, as it was intended to be – a chaotic pointer to chaotic times, hyped up beyond the point of no return, so that you finally accept almost every enormity as possible.

Bob Geldof as “Pink” Pinkerton. Photograph: Alamy/MGM/Entertainment Pictures

The brilliance, however, is never quite enough, and only in sections of the film is the depth of focus as impressive as the width. But since that’s precisely what one feels about Pink Floyd, one can hardly blame the film-maker for that. His achievement is considerable; 95 minutes is not playing safe. Parker has risked practically everything, and should be rewarded with a palpable hit.

Read on for other reviews, including Eastwood’s latest and ET: Extra Terrestrial