First, you have to forgive the spectacularly silly premise: When New Jersey junkyard inventor Jerry (Jack Black) runs afoul of a high-voltage line and his head becomes magnetized, he accidentally erases all of the VHS tapes in the rundown video store run by his buddy Mike (Mos Def). Unable to restock with DVDs, and eager to please their one slightly addled customer (Mia Farrow), Mike and Jerry decide to reshoot the movies with all the low-tech means at their disposal.

You also have to forgive Gondry's inability to rein in Jack Black. It's not all Gondry's fault - stronger directors have tried and failed to keep Black from going overboard - but the director seems too occupied with creating the sort of found-object designs he employed in "The Science of Sleep." Black is balanced by the low-key Mos Def and by a charming turn by Melonie Diaz as a neighborhood dry-cleaners' employee who becomes the leading lady of Mike and Jerry's mini-movies.

What makes it easy to forgive the faults of "Be Kind Rewind" is the free-wheeling re-creations of movie classics ranging from "Ghostbusters" to "Driving Miss Daisy." The inventiveness of these scenes - of using a clothes dryer to simulate the revolving spaceship from "2001" or Jerry donning pots-and-pans to portray RoboCop - is Gondry at his whimsical best.

When the movie parodies stop (thanks to that all-purpose villain, the movie-studio "suits"), the story gets a little gooey with sentimentality. But even then, "Be Kind Rewind" can be forgiven, because it truly inhabits the do-it-yourself spirit of independent filmmakers coloring outside the lines drawn by Hollywood.

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Be Kind Rewind

* WHERE: Theaters everywhere.

* WHEN: Opens today.

* RATING: PG-13 for some sexual references.

* RUNNING TIME: 100 minutes.

* BOTTOM LINE: Get past the set-up and groove to the imaginative remakes of Hollywood classics in this offbeat comedy.