PARK CITY, UTAH — "There must be some way outta here/Said the joker to the thief," Bob Dylan famously sang, and to judge by the jaundiced reaction of media and industry pros to Masked and Anonymous at the 19th Sundance Film Festival, which ended this past Sunday, Dylan himself could have used a getaway car. Said to have been co-written by Dylan and director Larry Charles under the pen names "Sergei Petrov" and "Rene Fontaine," the film is a cross between a media romp and a morality tale, and it plays like vaudeville. The time period is the near-future. The United States is now a banana republic. Civil war rages. In the middle of it all, John Goodman is mounting some kind of rock-concert con and navigating a parade of nasties that includes Jessica Lange, Jeff Bridges, Penélope Cruz, Val Kilmer, and Christian Slater. Then come the fried crazies: Bruce Dern, Mickey Rourke, Giovanni Ribisi, Fred Ward, Chris Penn. And let’s not forget Dylan himself hopping through the set like Edgar Allan Poe’s raven. Not that it isn’t fun in a "What-were-they-smoking?" kinda way, but Masked and Anonymous is an icon of independent film’s potentially fatal attraction toward celebrity and away from story.

If this festival has become a gauge of the temperature of current film culture, then Sundance at 19 was pretty hot. There were a dozen films worth seeing, another bunch that died trying, and precious few offenses to civilization. The Competition highlights included South African director Wayne Kramer’s The Cooler and Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini’s American Splendor. The latter, which won the Grand Jury Prize, is a paean to the patron saint of nobodies, Harvey Pekar, who came to chronicle his miserable loser’s life on the Polish side of Cleveland in a series of adult comic books — also titled American Splendor — that had the great good fortune to be drawn by a series of first-rate cartoonists including R. Crumb. There will not likely be a better comic portrait this year than Paul Giamatti’s portrayal of Pekar, and the film is an unorthodox hybrid of fiction, documentary, and animation: when the real Harvey Pekar has something to say about things, the film cuts to him, or goes into animation straight out of the comic book.

The Cooler is lighter fun, if a bit darkly. William H. Macy plays a guy whose karma has been so bad for so long that it’s earned him a job at Alec Baldwin’s Shangri-La casino, where Bill is employed to let his bad luck extinguish winners’ streaks at the craps tables. Guy on a roll on table nine? Bill throws a chip and it’s craps-out time. Bad for the high-rollers, good for the house. Macy is about to work off his debt and retire when Baldwin sends out a cocktail waitress (Maria Bello) to keep him around. That’s when his luck changes, and with it the fortunes of the house.

As for my coveted (?) "Burn the Negative" award, only two films qualified. Macaulay Culkin’s comeback may be delayed forever, at least to judge by his turn in Party Monster, a movie about the coked-up 1980s New York club scene that was widely held to be the most repellent film at Sundance. And someone should decommission Oliver Stone’s Comandante, which seeks to humanize Fidel Castro by condensing 30 hours of conversation with the Cuban leader down to 93 minutes. It achieves its goal at least to the extent that it gets a camera up close. But did we need Stone to do a Larry King with Fidel about the meaning of life, Viagra, and the director’s own decorated service in Vietnam? Somehow Stone never gets around to the important questions. The 40-year danse macabre between the US and Cuba deserves better than a pudgy buffoon’s squandered access.