The Men Who Stare at Goats

Caution: Staring at "The Men Who Stare at Goats" may result in your falling down laughing, courtesy of a devilishly smart script, subversive japery and a flawlessly funny cast.

Think of Luke Skywalker on the road with Neal Cassady in Jack Kerouac's famously stoned American odyssey. Or Frodo tripping hand in hand with "The Dude" Lebowski through a Middle Eastern desert, questing for Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds. That's the surreal flavor of this movie, a heroes' journey of the gloriously demented kind.

With his second feature, longtime George Clooney collaborator Grant Heslov (they co-wrote "Good Night, and Good Luck.") delivers a sweet-tempered satire about New Age mythologies, a wigged-out U.S. military, and America as it has dreamed itself, for good and ill, during the past three decades.

A cinematic head trip that's part memory of a uniquely American fall from innocence, part present-day redemptive journey for a callow Candide and a "cursed" knight, "Goats" swims in time with giddy abandon.

Diving deeply into 2003, we meet reporter Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor, young Obi-Wan Kenobi himself), a clueless boychick from Ann Arbor, Mich., who runs away to war after his wife leaves him for his editor (inexplicably equipped with a Strangelovian prosthetic). Then we backstroke to 1973, when one Bill Django (Jeff Bridges, gleefully channeling his inner Lebowski or a more socially responsible simulacrum) experiences an epiphany just as he's shot by a Viet Cong ("Their gentleness is their strength"). Dipping in and out of the '80s evolution of the New Earth Army, born of Django's post-Vietnam dream of "warrior monks" trained to wage war with psychic superpowers and love, we surface to join Wilton on his journey into the cloud-cuckoo-land of Iraq, guided by Lyn Cassady, self-styled Jedi warrior, onetime hero of the NEA and current dance studio proprietor (Clooney, flat-out superb).

Does the narrative trajectory sound like it's all over the map, chronologically and geographically? Well, yes, but as with all groovy trips in good company, the key is to go with the flow. Script and performance toughen the film's hallucinatory vignettes, shaping and propelling a story line "inspired" by Welsh journalist Jon Ronson's nonfiction history of "the apparent madness at the heart of U.S. military intelligence." Lest we dismiss "Goats" as wholly fantastical, a title card forewarns, "More of this is true than you would believe."

Wilton, cooling his heels in Kuwait City, runs into Cassady and recognizes him as a graduate of Django's school for psychic spooks. He can do this because he once interviewed a pudgy veteran (Stephen Root) of the corps, reduced to aiming his lethal gaze at his hamsters. (Root and Stephen Lang, the latter sporting a wonderfully psychotic grin as true believer Col. Hopgood, make impeccable nutcases.)

Whipcord fit, his hairline indented in a bristling widow's peak, and exuding the authority and certitude of the insane, Clooney semaphores superannuated military man, the kind of guy who wouldn't know irony if it up and bit him. Django having recently appeared to Cassady via psychic projection, the aging psy-spy is embarked on a top-secret mission in Iraq. Skeptical but fascinated, Wilton tags along.

Cassady regales his protégé with tales of NEA training (dancing, fire-walking, smoking pot), conjuring halcyon memories of The Dude as unlikely D.I., pigtailed and goateed, high on New Age war strategies. MacGregor's a dab hand at delicious double takes and mocking jabs, but he never lays a glove on Clooney's unflappable Jedi. Demonstrating the "sparkly eyes" defense technique, Cassady stretches his eyeballs to the max, aims a laser stare and waits in vain for Wilton to wilt.

No matter how often and cruelly reality slaps Cassady in the face (while practicing "cloud-bursting," he manages to crash into the only visible boulder in a horizon-spanning desert), this deadpan samurai hangs on to his fragile faith. A holy fool stumped by reality, Clooney makes sure to garner our sympathy, even as he cracks us up.

After getting captured by thugs and dodging a firefight between rival contractors, Wilton and his dubious mentor hurtle on to ever darker adventures, until finally the pair, nearly dead of thirst, are led out of the searing desert by a goat that shouldn't be there.

The grand "mission" seems to dead-end at a psychological-warfare complex, evoking Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Spearheading this perversion of psychic peacekeeping is the soulless "serpent" (Kevin Spacey, villainously funny as a jealous spoon-bender) who closed down Django's New Earth Eden and "cursed" Cassady by tempting him to stare a hapless goat to death. Redemption for all the lost boys, including an elderly, drug-addled Django, comes -- hilariously -- courtesy of the aforementioned Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, as a kind of Woodstock blooms in the middle of the Iraqi desert.

Widely hailed as "Coen Lite" and generating a satisfactory quota of hipster laughs, "The Men Who Stare at Goats" has been dismissed as lacking the comedic gravitas manifested by films like "Three Kings" and "Dr. Strangelove." Perhaps, but this writer savored every moment of a movie populated by a tribe of engaging, eccentric performers, so exuberantly at play in a satirical sandbox.

And, really, is there any resisting an acidly funny American guilt trip that references both "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" -- you remember, that old ditty about a dead seagull -- and "The Silence of the Goats"?