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THE opening credits of "Clerks II" feature a travelogue montage of suburbia, as a song by Talking Heads gently croons, "Years ago I was an angry young man." The same might be said of writer and director Kevin Smith. Since bursting onto the scene 12 years ago with the first "Clerks" -- a rowdy, melancholy-laced comedy about dead-end jobs financed largely on credit cards -- and over the course of six more features, Smith has become a curiously divisive figure, somehow symbolizing tremendous success and total failure.

His notoriously dedicated fan base, feverishly reciting quotes and rabidly buying up his merchandise, sees him as a regular guy made good. Critics, by and large, have come to see him as self-satisfied and lazy. Coming off the critical and commercial implosion of his previous film, "Jersey Girl," which was a conscious attempt at making a more conventional mainstream movie, Smith finds himself back where he started. Though it may be easy to dismiss the dour reception of "Jersey Girl" as simply a part of the backlash against the tabloid romance of its stars, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, there is certainly more to it than that, as the film exposed cracks in the foundation of Smith's work.

As if to encapsulate the rather uncertain position Smith now occupies in the Hollywood landscape, HBO's insider comedy "Entourage" recently dropped Smith's name (alongside Michael Bay, no less) as shorthand for sloppy, soulless filmmaking. By reviving the characters from his first feature in "Clerks II," Smith now takes stock of his emotional life in his mid-30s in the same way "Clerks" surveyed his 20s. A freewheeling farce on lack of direction, stillborn ambitions and a life of mindless drudgery has given way to a rueful examination of unfulfilled promises, dashed dreams and the resigned acceptance of one's lot in life.

Though he often projects a demeanor of laid-back affability, there is also a free-floating air of anxiety and discontentment that hovers near Smith as well. He has an astounding recollection of his own bad reviews -- hello, Eleanor Ringel Gillespie of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution -- and exhibits an uncanny knack for diffusing criticism by preemptively turning it into a joke. Over the course of two encounters in the span of a few days, he wore similar-looking athletic jerseys with slogans emblazoned across the back -- one read "Hack" and the other "Sell Out."