More than 20 years after it wrestled America's collective brain wave into reluctant submission, the Rubik's Cube is back for another twist.

Featured prominently in Will Smith's new movie, "The Pursuit of Happyness," the multicolored, early-'80s icon is set for its brightest appearance in the pop-culture spotlight since the Saturday-morning cartoon "Rubik, The Amazing Cube."

The film opens today, and Chris Hardwick can't wait to see it.

Hardwick, who is 23 and lives in Raleigh, is a world-champion Cube solver who prefers to tackle the puzzle blindfolded. After attending speed-solving championships for the past few years and watching the Cube's popularity rise, he's excited about the movie's potential for expanding the puzzle's fan base.

Part of the Cube's appeal lies with the challenge, Hardwick says, and part of it is the "wow" factor in seeing a finished puzzle, "that you can take all this chaos and order it."

Hungarian architecture professor Erno Rubik unleashed that chaos with his mid-'70s invention of the toy. It didn't take long for the mind-bender to catch on. Puzzlers bought more than 100 million between 1980 and 1982, according to Hasbro, the Cube's American distributor.

At the height of the Rubik's craze, books were written to aid potential solvers, colored stickers were sold for those who wanted to "solve" their Cube without effort and in 1981, nearly every single American child received a Cube in their Christmas stocking.

Although she declined to give specific numbers, Hasbro spokeswoman Patricia Riso says sales of the Cube increased 73 percent from 2004 to 2005, and are expected to increase an additional 80 percent this year. The Internet-based speed-cubing community has helped spur sales, as have nostalgia-minded parents passing on the toy to their children.

In "The Pursuit of Happyness," which is set in 1981, the Rubik's Cube serves as a metaphor for the determination of Smith's character to turn his life around after the breakup of his marriage and a bout of homelessness.

Tyson Mao, a record-holding Cube acquaintance of Hardwick's, served as Smith's puzzle consultant on the movie set. The actor got the hang of it pretty quickly, says Mao, who lives in Burlingame, Calif., and recently earned his astrophysics degree.

But you don't have to be as studious as Mao to beat the puzzle. With some work and access to the Internet's myriad problem-solving sites, "anyone can solve the Rubik's Cube," he says.

Although the standard Cube has six 3-block by 3-block sides (3x3x3), Hardwick's specialty is the bigger Cubes. He holds the world speed records for solving the 4-block (4x4x4) version and the 5-block (5x5x5) Cubes while blindfolded -- as recognized by the World Cube Association.

Hardwick's record for the 4x4x4 Cube is 8 minutes and 4 seconds. That time includes the effort spent eyeing the scrambled puzzle. Much of Cube-solving is based in pattern memorization, and once he puts on the blindfold, Hardwick unravels the instructions he's stored in his brain. Blindfolded, he can successfully solve a Cube about 80 percent of the time.

Hardwick, a UNC-Chapel Hill grad who works as a barista and a math tutor while exploring career opportunities, first played with a Cube in the early '90s, when he inherited one from a Rubik's-frustrated friend on the school bus. It wasn't until 1998 that he dug around on the Internet for help with completing the puzzle. "That's what got me hooked," he says.

Now the Rubik's world is waiting to see if a movie star can do the same for a new generation.