"Bruno" is Sacha Baron Cohen's latest quasi-documentary stunt comedy, and if anything, it's a crazier, funnier and even pricklier pin cushion of a movie than his 2006 smash hit "Borat."

Teaming up for the second time with director Larry Charles, Baron Cohen once again wanders America and the world in the put-on role of a doltish, egomaniacal pest. This time he's Bruno, a moronic and very, very gay Austrian fashion-celebrity freak in skintight hot pants and a mop of Eurotrash hair that spills over his forehead like the tail of a dead squirrel.

Bruno has one obsession, to become famous, and he'll do whatever it takes to achieve it. He tries to meet celebrities. He crashes a swingers' party, in a scene so hilariously bizarre you've got to see it to believe it. He appears on a Dallas talk show to parade his adopted black baby, which nearly touches off a riot. The scene is a scathing poke at stars who turn adopted kids into accessories, yet the real joke is that it doesn't take long for a talk show devoted to tolerance to bring out the pitchfork-mob rage of the studio audience.

"Bruno" is not a movie that behaves itself. You can't squeeze it into a tidy liberal box. The more uncomfortable Bruno makes people, from a group of hunters to politician Ron Paul, the more he draws attention to their pettiness and homophobia.

Yet is Bruno himself a homophobic caricature? He certainly feeds into a stereotype of haughty flamboyance. Yet if one condemns the movie on that basis, what about, say, Robin Williams' inspired camping in "The Birdcage?" Where do you draw the politically correct line?

The bottom line, for me, is that Bruno, as a character, remains gleefully unapologetic about who he is. "Bruno" ends on a note of scandalously funny out-and-proud triumph, and that's because Sacha Baron Cohen never makes a plea for tolerance. He tosses a grenade for it.