At 22, Harmony Korine was Hollywood's hottest property. Five years later he was down and out on the streets of Paris. But life is finally back on track

Harmony Korine is no longer a hip young thing. Ambling across the hotel lobby comes a man in his mid-thirties, dressed in rumpled, plain clothes and wearing a greying rash of stubble. He bears little resemblance to the prodigy who wowed the Hollywood Establishment as the 22-year-old scriptwriter for Larry Clark's controversial film Kids (1995). In the late Nineties, he earned a place in the art-house canon by directing Gummo (1997) and Julien Donkey-Boy (1999), while his hedonistic personal life and relationship with the actress Chloë Sevigny ensured regular appearances in the style magazines and gossip columns.

With Mister Lonely, his first feature film in eight years, out this month, Korine now looks back on that period from the other side of almost complete burnout. Aside from a few abortive projects and a short documentary about his friend David Blaine, the magician, his output over the past decade has been virtually non-existent. Crippled by his early success, he succumbed to depression and drug use. He has said he fell "out of love" with film, but admits that it was also a more fundamental kind of breakdown. "To say that I had a choice would be giving me too much credit. In the end, it left me. It's difficult to make movies when you can't function and you have very little love to give or to receive."

Korine hit rock bottom in the early 2000s when he spent several months in Paris, mostly living alone. By his own account, he was in "bad shape. My teeth were falling out, I was walking the streets, I couldn't speak the language, I had no one to talk to." He fled partly to escape the New York party scene, in which he had never quite felt at home. "I was surrounded by people who I thought were leeches. And obviously if I can't stand the people that I'm around, well, I must be putting off something. In some ways I felt like I needed to self-destruct." Dramatically, not one but two of his houses were destroyed by fire. "My houses burned down and I was off."

Korine's recuperation began when he moved back to his childhood home country, Tennessee, where he still lives with his wife, Rachel, an actress. Today he fizzes with an endearingly mischievous energy and a cheeky, expectant grin plays across his face. He has clearly recovered his passion for cinema, and rattles off the names of directors and films that pop into his head: "Did you ever see that movie Pixote? Hector Babenco, Brazilian film. Write it down: p-i-x-o-t-e."

Mister Lonely was written in collaboration with his brother Avi during that period of recuperation. It is partly inspired by his time in Paris, and the experience of "being in a city that beautiful and at the same time being solitary and destitute". The film is a surreal exploration of the world of celebrity impersonation. A Michael Jackson look alike, played by Diego Luna, meets a "Marilyn Monroe" (Samantha Morton) who invites him to join a commune of impersonators based at a castle in the Scottish Highlands. In a parallel storyline, a group of nuns in the Latin American jungle discover that they can jump out of a plane without a parachute and not die.

The two stories bear no obvious relationship to one another. The plot sounds ridiculous, and at times does come across as flimsy and irritatingly whimsical. But the interweaving strands, along with a stunning soundtrack by Jason Pierce of Spiritualized, build into a tender, moving abstract poetry. For Korine, cinema should make "emotional sense": "Sometimes when I'm making films, I'm trying to make sense of nonsense."

The Jackson character was inspired by an impersonator he watched on the street in Germany. "It was raining and no one was paying him any attention. I thought, 'Man, what a strange way to make a living. Who is the person underneath the impersonator? What does he do when he goes home and talks on the phone? What's his voice? Where's that line of separation?'" Korine also wanted to explore the pitfalls of collective living - a subject close to his heart, as he was raised on a commune by hippie parents. "I wanted to create a utopia, a dream. Sometimes in these communities people can withdraw to such a degree that they really start tweaking out. It's interesting to watch when the real world starts to encroach and you see things fall apart."

In earlier films, and in the script for Kids, Korine focused on dissolute youngsters. He is now keen to shake his reputation as a spokesman for disaffected youth. "I'm not a vérité film-maker. I'm not really concerned with any sense of a cemented truth. That is just boring and dull. I was just trying to be entertaining, to put on a show on-screen and off. I never set out to make grand political statements."

Both Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy excited controversy with their supposedly immoral content, and Mister Lonely has provoked a similar response from some reviewers. "One journalist wrote that she'd never seen a movie this mean-spirited and cruel. She said that I had sadistic tendencies." Korine's sense of humour, which does not always stick to accepted boundaries, makes him vulnerable to such misunderstanding. One scene, in which the Jackson character performs at an old people's home, prompted uneasy laughter at the screening I attended. "It's a nice feeling to laugh at something and feel a little bit guilty," he says. "You know, you should feel a little bit guilty for laughing."

His next project sounds typically surreal: an "instructional video", based on his meeting with a woman who was displaced by Hurricane Katrina. A former tap dancer, she claims that certain dance moves, performed in a particular order, will put the viewer into a deep trance. "She taught me the moves and I've made this video. It's weird, because the only way you can get out of this trance is if you do the exact same routine in reverse." Is he joking? Who knows? Perhaps it doesn't really matter. With Harmony Korine, it's the show that counts.

"Mister Lonely" (cert 15) is released on 14 March

Harmony Korine: the CV

1973 Born in Bolinas, California, to Sol Korine, documentary film-maker

1993 Swaps poetry for half-pipes when he drops out of an English degree at New York University after one semester to pursue a career as a professional skateboarder

1995 Catches the photographer/director Larry Clark's eye at a New York skate park. When Clark asks Korine to write something about his everyday experiences, Kids is the result

1997 Makes his directorial debut with Gummo, which attracts as much criticism as it does praise. Receives a fan letter from Bernardo Bertolucci for his efforts

1999 Takes inspiration from his paranoid schizophrenic uncle for Julien Donkey-Boy. The director Thomas Vinterberg asks him to start the American New Wave by filming it according to the Dogme 95 manifesto, rule book of a hyperrealist style that decrees the use of hand-held photography and natural light only

1999 Korine is banned from The Late Show after pushing Meryl Streep in the green room

2001 He is forced to abandon his project Fight Harm, in which he heckles passers-by until they beat him up, when he is hospitalised after his sixth fight

2002 Writes the script for Ken Park and is reunited with Clark to make the film. Despite showings at the Toronto and Telluride film festivals, it fails to find a distributor, because of its explicit content

Nichi Hodgson Harmony Korine: the CV

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