Fans and detractors alike will bring the same set of questions to the new Sacha Baron Cohen movie, “The Dictator,” in which he plays Admiral General Aladeen, the tyrannical, extravagantly bearded leader of the fictional Republic of Wadiya. What fresh outrage have we now from this British comic guerrilla who has managed to annoy the Anti-Defamation League, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and the government of Kazakhstan, to name just a few unamused parties? Who exactly is the joke on this time, and will they get it? And what happens when the most aggressive and confrontational satirist in contemporary comedy has to make do without real-life foils and stooges?

“The Dictator,” which opens May 16, confirms Mr. Baron Cohen’s knack for distilling exaggerated stereotypes, political triggers and cultural hot buttons into a single, monumentally ridiculous figure. But it also inaugurates a new phase of his career, not least for introducing his first new persona in more than a decade. The three daredevil buffoons in his repertoire — the British gangsta poseur Ali G, the Kazakh simpleton Borat, the Austrian fashionista Bruno — were developed on his series “Da Ali G Show.” All three were broadcast journalists of a sort, which allowed Mr. Baron Cohen’s farces to double as exposés, ambush documentaries designed to highlight the vanity and vacuity of his subjects or locate the tipping point of their tolerance.

Given the obvious difficulties of masquerading as a murderous despot — and perhaps because the supply of camera-ready dupes has dwindled after “Borat” and “Brüno” — “The Dictator” is Mr. Baron Cohen’s first American vehicle to be fully scripted and cast with professional actors. But in recounting the exploits of a stranger in a strange land, the film retains the template he has adopted since crossing the Atlantic himself in 2003: a de Tocquevillian journey that purports to illuminate the psyche of America and its place in the world.

Mr. Baron Cohen’s stock in trade is the culture clash, which he sees as a bottomless source of comedy and horror. “The Dictator” stages an absurd collision in consigning Aladeen, a short-fused megalomaniac with a taste for high-class prostitutes and a budding nuclear program, to an organic health food co-op in Brooklyn, where an overalls-clad activist, Zoe (Anna Faris), has mistaken him for a Wadiyan dissident. A deeply improbable romance blooms, though contrary to early reports — presumably planted by Mr. Baron Cohen — “The Dictator” is not an adaptation on “Zabibah and the King,” a romantic novel set in ancient Iraq once believed to have been written by Saddam Hussein.