He's looking for a little peace and quiet

"Noise" is a weird, crazy, grabby little movie that thinks big thoughts. A comedy of ideas written and directed by Henry Bean ("The Believer"), it stars a hilarious and hefty (in a good way, his self-assured charisma is infinitely expanding) Tim Robbins as a New York bourgeois who, radicalized by the suffering caused him by the ear-splitting din of the city, transforms himself into a self-styled noise-vigilante called "The Rectifier."

Though you'd never guess it, "Noise" has autobiographical roots. Like Robbins' fictional David Owen, Bean lives in Manhattan and found himself going out one night to break into a car and turn off its alarm. Bean wound up getting arrested, appearing before a judge and not repeating the experience. David, on the other hand, becomes compulsive. He gets arrested, appears before an initially amused but ultimately unsympathetic judge, spends a night in jail and then goes out and does it again.

Nobody seems to share David's outrage for what he believes is a daily assault on his senses, compounded by the utter indifference of city officials and the unfair influence of car alarm manufacturers. Never mind that everybody suffers, or that the cops, addressing the camera, assure us that a car alarm has never prevented a single car theft in New York City. Not even David's wife, Helen (Bridget Moynahan), a beautiful but dull and conformist cellist, understands why he doesn't just learn to ignore the noise or block it out. Her life, with its impossibly spacious Manhattan town house and cultivated, nonlucrative career, is perfect as it is. And this perfection is at least partly dependent on her ability to shut out any unpleasantness.

At first, David tries to restrain himself. He refines his protest by trying to take repeat offenders to small claims court. But he keeps losing, the car alarms keep blaring and ultimately he can't resist the siren call to vigilante action. (David is reading "The Odyssey" to his young daughter Chris, played by Gabrielle Brennan, who asks him if police and ambulance sirens aren't named after the mythological creatures whose alluring songs caused sailors to crash against the rocks. It's a good question.)