A & E

"Crash," the new Starz TV show inspired by the 2005 Oscar-winning movie of the same name, is starting to come together.

The 13-episode series starring Dennis Hopper debuted in mid-October with several seemingly disconnected story lines.

While it's too early for certainty, one senses some sort of redemption is afoot, featuring a mysterious Guatemalan last seen running toward America in a dead man's shoes.

A strange prediction, but this a strange show.

The story to date:

Ben Cendars (Hopper) is a music mogul we first encountered as he was enjoying intimacies with himself in the back of his limo.

All told, his life is pretty lame. He can't find any new music he likes and is tired of the current craze, which won't go away. "Hip hop's a zombie," he observes. "And you can't kill a zombie."

Gray-haired, wiry and given to philosophical meanderings, Ben also is haunted by death, noting "that good dark night" is closing in, although he's not ready to give up his ghost quite yet.

Meanwhile, most of the other characters in the L.A.-based show are caught up in their own dramas, none of which are especially heroic.

Christine Emory (Clare Carey) is a housewife deeply lusting after a new kitchen, among other things. Her husband, a real-estate shark named Peter (D.B. Sweeney), instructs her that this is "not the time to be asking for a raise on your allowance." In a bow to tradition, Christine squeezes a commitment out of him the old-fashioned way. We assume she's warming up for other conquests.

The crisply written series also features corrupt and philandering cops Axel Finet (Nick E. Tarabay) and Kenny Battaglia (Ross McCall), a paramedic named Eddie Choi (Brian Tee) who recently left life as a gangbanger, a world-class nympho named Inez (Moran Atias) and, most intriguingly, Cesar Uman (Luis Chavez), a young Guatemalan making his way toward America and enduring hell with every step.

In last week's episode, Cesar is captured by the Mexican police, a gang of meaty thugs who shake him down for his last peso, then attempt to put him on a bus back home.

Cesar manages to escape, thanks, in part, to a pair of shoes he took off a corpse. He's last seen running in the direction of his promised land, where one senses he might change the lives of at least some of the desperate Angelenos.

Ben seems primed for transformation. While initially a mere weirdo with a cashbox for a heart, he is an increasingly sympathetic figure -- lonely, unhealthy, and now determined to make a rap star out of his limo driver, Anthony Adams (Jocko Sims), despite Anthony's lack of credentials.

"What do you mean you don't rap?" Ben asks after lining up a studio session with a local magnate.

"I write poetry," Anthony replies.

No matter, the boss declares in fine philosophical feather. "This is Saint Crispin's Day. True genius is never planned."

Ben also waxes poetic about how Anthony should "feel the beat of the African Diaspora cruising through your veins," underscoring a habit of sending illicit substances through his own bloodstream.

"My clarity is crystal until the devil offers his confections," he tells Anthony, and there are plenty of demons in Los Angeles, one of whom gets Ben wasted during the recording session.

"I'm dying," a deeply stoned Ben utters at the end of last week's show. "This is what death looks like."

Yet maybe help is on the way, wearing resurrected shoes. Or maybe Cesar is Ben's love child. The show, although quirky, is worth watching to learn weird Ben's fate.

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