Profile: Tyler Perry, director - quietly testing the waters with her new film

• Anika Noni Rose, Kerry Washington, Janet Jackson, Kimberly Elise, Phylicia Rashad, Loretta Devine, Tessa Thompson and Thandie Newton take roles originally identified in the play by the colour of their clothes

Is Tyler Perry capable of highbrow cinema? The studio behind his tenth movie is determined to make audiences and Oscar voters look beyond his track record and answer yes.

Perry is the most successful black filmmaker ever - he has directed nine films, and last year was executive producer on the Oscar-winning Precious. He also has an enormous business in stage shows and two television series.

But Perry - who writes, directs, produces and frequently stars in his films - also has a reputation as a one-man schlock factory. His movies are reviled by many critics, who complain that his original source material panders and stereotypes, while his directing is sloppy and unsubtle. Now comes For Colored Girls, an attempt by Perry to make a radical turn towards the art-house crowd.

For Colored Girls is based on source material as credible as it comes: For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf, Ntozake Shange's seminal play about race and gender. The film is rated R in the US (similar to the UK's 18 rating but allowing children accompanied by someone over 21), a first for Perry, whose previous pictures have all aimed at a religious audience. The starring actresses (who include Phylicia Rashad and Whoopi Goldberg) are of a calibre rarely seen in Perry's work.

Perhaps most telling, Lionsgate has not been selling For Colored Girls as a Tyler Perry film, even though he directed it and adapted it for the screen. Perry's name - typically trumpeted from the rooftops in marketing materials - is noticeably underplayed in the film's promotional campaign, lightly written on billboards and buried on forcoloredgirlsmovie.com.

Instead Lionsgate has tried to position For Colored Girls as a work of art. One poster for the film nodded to Piet Mondrian's grid paintings; ads on billboards and bus shelters have gone for a sharply contemporary feel, blending graffiti with portraiture. The centrepiece of the studio's marketing campaign in the US was a series of filmed cast portraits, which run about four minutes on continuous loop and were exhibited on high-definition television screens at Lehmann Maupin, a New York gallery.

Tim Palen, Lionsgate's co-president for marketing, shot the portraits on 35mm film. He said the project was inspired by the work of Robert Wilson, the avant-garde stage director who has filmed so-called living portraits of celebrities like Brad Pitt and Robert Downey Jr.

Eight For Colored Girls portraits were made, one for each of the film's principal actresses. They depict the subjects alive but barely moving; artful lettering appears over parts of the screen. In one, Janet Jackson, who plays Jo, a businesswoman who has willed herself to forget her tough upbringing, is perched dramatically on a chair and appears immobile except for blinking eyes.

"A recording of Janet Jackson breathing for four minutes should be in the Smithsonian as far as I'm concerned," Palen said. "The goal is to immediately communicate to people that this is a different kind of film for Tyler."

For his part Perry has been playing the recluse - perhaps taking a page from Mo'Nique, who refused to participate in the traditional Oscar race last year for her role in Precious. She won best supporting actress anyway.

In an interview in March, Perry addressed the skepticism that greeted his decision to tackle Shange's play, which has become a staple in US college feminist studies courses and is widely seen as influencing a generation of spoken-word poets and performance artists. "I think they have every right to be shocked," he said. "And I've even seen outrage, 'How dare you touch this? We don't want this to be this way."' He added, "Rest assured that I'm going to stay very true to what Ntozake's done."

Did Shange have any qualms about Perry's adapting her play? "I did," she says. "I had a lot of qualms. I worried about his characterisations of women as plastic."

Of the completed film Shange says, "I think he did a very fine job, although I'm not sure I would call it a finished film."

Reviews have been less kind than for Precious - Variety called Perry's work "more inauthentically melodramatic than ever" and the Hollywood Reporter deemed it "a train wreck."

But Lionsgate has high hopes for the film, citing a severe shortage in the marketplace of movies showcasing ethnic casts and stories.

In addition the studio thinks For Colored Girls is the type of movie that can turn into a must-see for black women, along the lines of 1995's Waiting to Exhale and 1998's How Stella Got Her Groove Back.

If Perry yearns for artistic credibility, there is evidence beyond this one risky venture. As well as lending his name to Precious as an executive producer, to make that film more marketable, in 2008 Perry founded an art-house banner called 34th Street Productions. For Colored Girls is the first release.

"It marks him moving beyond entertainment and into art," says Thandie Newton, who plays Tangie, a sharp-tongued bartender. "To have a man of esteem and power honor women in this way is impressive and necessary."

• For Colored Girls is released in the UK on 10 December.