I’ve been spending the day or so after watching The Anarchist Cookbook trying to decide whether I like it or not.

The movie is a satire surrounding “Puck,” a young fellow in Dallas who hangs out with a group of squatters calling themselves “anarchists”-some hippies, some stoners, some merely escapists. They loot, they run an anarchist bookstore collective, and they conceive plots of civil disobedience against evil corporations and institutions of learning. Their ideals are put to the test when a new guy, Johnny Black, comes along to tell them that they’ve just been pissing in the wind and need to take real action-and he waves the movie’s namesake book above his head as their new bible. Yes, Johnny proves to be a bad seed, willing to go way beyond the others’ level of lawbreaking in order to further his own idea of anarchy. As he slowly smothers and takes control of the gang, Puck has to decide how to save them, and along the way gets a chance to dip his toes back into the lukewarm water of corporation-tolerant society and re-evaluate his beliefs.

Real anarchists have griped that the characters in this movie aren’t real anarchists. Well, it’s a satire, so no archetype in this movie is the real thing, whether it’s an anarchist, a Republican, a militant redneck, a neo-Nazi, a middle-income parent, or an office drone getting their pick-me-up at the nearest Starbucks on the block.

The characters and situations were just interesting enough to keep me sucked in and wait to see how it all played out. But ultimately I think the writing was just too trite and the acting too histrionic at times—waking the viewer out of disbelief every so often just to say, “Hey, aren’t we clever and satiric!”

I could see little nods to other favorite movies of mine throughout: Clerks, Tapeheads, Trainspotting, etc. Maybe that is this film’s trouble—it knows what made other films fresh and original but doesn’t know how to be original itself. (It didn’t help that it also occasionally reminded me of Saturday afternoon TV specials.)

Ultimately, the central message of the movie, if indeed it had any, was lost on me.