A TACKILY AIRBRUSHED spaceship hurtles toward the earth. A heavy-breasted nude woman floats in front of a metallic city. Brightly colored space suits, holstered lasers, and a glass pyramid -- these were the images that marketed Philip K. Dick to America, and they were anathema to many of his fans. Pulpy cover art lumped Dick, likened to Borges by The New York Times Book Review, in with the hacks who pump out outer-space Tarzan stories. Despite winning science fiction's prestigious Hugo award for The Man in the High Castle, Dick's talent remained largely unrecognized outside of the genre until a 1975 interview in Rolling Stone. Since then, PKD has come increasingly into vogue, in part because technology has made his media-obsessed narratives more and more relevant. His relentless interrogation of identity and fascination with conspiracy hardly seem eccentric in an era that debates cloning, historical revisionism, and born-again right-wing spies for the Russians. Though Dick suffered a fatal stroke in 1982, his forty novels and innumerable short stories have gone on to spawn three films (Blade Runner, Total Recall, and the regrettable Screamers) and inspire a body of film criticism to rival Citizen Kane.

Next year promises to see Dick's Hollywood stock rise even more. A short story is being made into Impostor, starring Gary Sinise and due to be released this fall. No less a cinema magnate than Steven Spielberg has signed on to direct another adaptation, Minority Report, rumored to be starring Tom Cruise and Matt Damon. The timing, then, for The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick, a documentary about Dick's visionary experiences and bouts with mental illness, is impeccable.

The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick, which opened Friday in New York and Chicago, is a collaboration between Sacramento-based filmmakers Mark Steensland and Andy Massagli. The bulk of the film is an edited collection of interviews with Dick's friends and admirers, including counterculture icon Robert Anton Wilson. Unfortunately, there is no actual footage of Dick, though an animated PKD spouts interesting if random passages from the Rolling Stone interview.

The film is an admirable effort, but ultimately its limited focus and amateurish editing reproduces the notion that PKD's pulpy covers helped create -- that science fiction is a genre created by and written for young boys who never quite become men. A lengthy tour through the library that holds much of PKD's original material (a librarian drearily explains that "these are the actual stacks and shelves that hold Philip K. Dick materials") is bluntly hagiographic, as are scenes that feature the facade of Dick's old house and a police station he called in moments of paranoia. The animated intertitles are also tedious -- PKD inserts a sheet of paper into his typewriter, types out a message, pulls out the paper, and sets it face up on a stack. He repeats the process three or four times to communicate a single sentence. These sequences are hard to forgive, especially given the film's glaring omissions -- the filmmakers interview none of the academics who have studied Dick's narratives, nor do they really talk with writers or filmmakers about how he influenced their work, nor do they explore Dick's relationships with women (he was married and divorced five times).

To be fair, this isn't quite the purpose of the documentary, and its redeeming moments come when it focuses on pivotal events in Dick's life. By all accounts, Phil Dick was not a particularly happy man. He battled depression and drug addiction throughout his life, tried to commit suicide at least once, and may have been harassed by the FBI's Cointelpro program. During the last ten years of his life, he had a number of bizarre, visionary experiences. In 1974, Dick saw a pink beam shoot from a woman's ichthus necklace and hit him in the forehead. Dick claims his consciousness was bifurcated, and he saw himself simultaneously as Philip Kindred Dick and as Simon Magus, a Christian persecuted by the Romans. It would be easy to dismiss the event as a schizophrenic episode, and Dick, whose novels are full of split personalities and Manchurian candidates, dutifully considered the possibility. Most difficult for Dick (and his readers) to comprehend were subsequent communications with the beam in which he was "given" information he could not otherwise have known. One oracular session convinced PKD that his newborn son had a potentially fatal birth defect that had gone unnoticed by his doctors. The boy was taken to the hospital, where doctors confirmed an inguinal hernia. Surgery was scheduled for the next day.

Dick never did decide precisely what had happened to him, though he explored a host of options (alien technology, Russian technology, alien/Russian technology -- this was Berkeley in the seventies, after all) in an eight-thousand page exegesis. It's this kind of earnest and diligent grappling that makes his later work so compelling. The "pink-beam" experience was dramatized in VALIS, a novel that would have been called magical realist in another time and place. Perhaps even more than the deservedly popular Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the inspiration for Blade Runner), VALIS and its companion volumes, The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer epitomize the Dick oeuvre -- multiple realities, paranoia, and postmodern anxiety about authentic humanity pervade the text. Androids interrogates those themes, but the novel is still about one heroic (if slightly perplexed) man in the fantastical future. In the VALIS triptych, PKD's theological and epistemological musings are carried out in the quotidian present. Characters get cancer, overdose on drugs, and complain about politics while VALIS's semi-autobiographical narrator, Horselover Fat, explains the whole mess using early Christian gnosticism. These later works are the ones that really push the boundaries of the genre, deftly blending the mythological with the mundane. It's this quality that makes this work so enduring. Nineteen-eighty-four and 2001 arrived largely without incident, after all, but we continue to marvel at the weirdness of ordinary life.