When I stumbled across a chance to see a little-circulated film version of Joyce's notoriously difficult novel, I jumped at it. I knew very little about the book other than that most people who had successfully read it usually had or wound up with advanced degrees in English. Myself not being one of them, I thought I would give it a shot nonetheless. The movie was quite difficult, though not traumatically so. The style is perhaps closest to that of Eraserhead in that it is dreamlike, though the palpable similarities end there. Though I have no frame of reference on which to judge it, I am fairly certain that in 1963, and probably even today, that no closer adaptation could be made, and almost certainly would not be made. If you're facing the book as an assignment of some sort, little harm would probably come to you if you watched the film along with an attempt to read the book, using it as a guide, though your professor might not see eye to eye with that view.