Spanish director/screenwriter Pedro Almodóvar has long had an autobiographical streak running through his films. In his latest, “Bad Education” (“La Mala Educación”), that streak has become the movie itself.

Set in Madrid in 1980, the protagonist is a young film director looking for inspiration for his next movie when in walks a long-lost schoolboy friend — and his first love — with a script based on their youthful crush and the priest who came between them while abusing the latter.

Fele Martínez is terrific as director Enrique Goded (the surname a naughty pun in Spanish), while Gael García Bernal (“The Motorcycle Diaries”) gives a tour-de-force performance as former-and-once-again flame Ignacio. Along with his movie script, he also announces that he's an actor and that he wishes to be addressed by his stage name, Ángel.

Reading the screenplay mostly out of personal curiosity, Goded becomes immersed in it while the screen imagery dissolves into a depiction of it. As that story line unfolds, a transvestite discovers that the young man he's picked up at his drag show is his chGoded, besotted with both the script and Ignacio/Angel (though not entirely convinced he is who he claims to be), embarks on a detective mission and the filming of his lover's screenplay with said lover as the star.

Over the course of “Bad Education,” Mexican García Bernal slips into a convincing Castilian accent and back-and-forth in time while portraying multiple characters. The entire film hangs on his performance and he delivers a masterpiece.

Onscreen, the various stories and characters intertwine from the two boys’ Catholic school youth to the present day — but what actually happened or is happening and what is only the filmed version of it?
Like the great works of Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini and Alfred Hitchcock, Almodóvar's film flirts with imagination versus reality, the constructs of time and the medium of film itself. Married to the Spaniard's signature richly hued and vibrant visual style, the viewer is swept breathlessly along to the movie's richly rewarding resolution.

A slow, steady metamorphosis has been taking place in Almodóvar over his last few films, but the transformation is now complete. Where he was once his nation's John Waters — exposing the severely kinky underbelly of a conservative country in deliciously campy, if ultimately slight, movies — he has become a master of modern cinema.

“Bad Education” is breathtakingly brilliant.