'Swiss Army Man' a flamboyantly absurdist comedy

The not-quite surrealistic and flamboyantly absurdist "Swiss Army Man" either grabs you and works on its own weird level, or it doesn't.

But it surely represents a courageous and personal leap of faith by two young filmmakers and music video masters Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan (collectively called Daniels) anxious to test their artistic wings unencumbered by Hollywood's profit-oriented anchors and by society's snobby attitudes toward lowbrow comedy.

Erstwhile "Harry Potter" star Daniel Radcliffe - who has racked up an impressive list of quirky stage and film characters in recent years - plays a fiercely flatulent corpse named Manny.

He washes up on the shore of an apparently deserted island where a depressed shipwreck survivor named Hank (Paul Dano) is about to hang himself out of loneliness.

A resourceful man, Hank jumps on Manny's back and uses his gaseous emissions to propel him over the ocean as if riding a human jet ski.

In short order, the two dock at another seemingly abandoned piece of land where upon Manny's head comes to magical life, able to speak but he can do nothing else.

The two become fast friends as Hank becomes Manny's window to the world, explaining concepts such as love, sex and life - but mostly sex - to a corpse suffering from complete amnesia.

Hank tries to help Manny remember something. He even uses a photo of a young mystery woman (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) on a nearly defunct cellphone to jog his dead memory cells.

Some of "Swiss Army Man" sings with invention and insight. Other parts squawk, particularly when scenes play out longer than their effectiveness allows.

Both Radcliffe and Dano commit themselves admirably to the most outrageous levels of the Daniels' out-of-the-box narrative, one that confirms the necessity for companionship, imagination, sharing and old-fashioned storytelling.

"Swiss Army Man" - perhaps a reference to Manny being a lifesaving, multifunctional survival device - marks Daniels as filmmakers to watch, especially to see if their brand of highly, highly personal narrative translates into something even bolder and more challenging.

It's already far beyond the movie that it begs comparisons to - the silly dead-body comedy "Weekend at Bernie's."