Venice Film Festival

A trim, lively comedy powered by a winning quartet of personality performances and an endearingly naff drive-time rock soundtrack, Grant Heslov’s helming debut “The Men Who Stare at Goats” doesn’t make too many demands of its audience. In return, we shouldn’t make too many demands of the film.

Anyone looking for a skewering satire of U.S. military practice might come away disappointed, even as the film opens with the cute semi-disclaimer, “More of this is true than you might imagine.”

Based on British journalist-humorist Jon Ronson’s book of the same title, which investigated the development of outlandish psychological warfare techniques in the U.S. army and their application in the Iraq war, Heslov’s film (from a script by Peter Straughan) jettisons most of Ronson’s dark gallows humor in favor of a sunnier, sillier sort of absurdity.

Not much has been retained but the idea of crazy psychic soldiers with telekinetic powers (the title is to be taken literally), but given the indifference of film audiences to anything remotely Iraq-related, you can hardly blame the “Goats” team for playing down the political currency of their source material.

What does survive is a measure of the author’s cockeyed Limey humor, Hollywood-polished into a zippy series of deadpan one-liners: “He wasn’t dying of the cancer, he was dying of a broken heart … and maybe the cancer,” a character intones solemnly at one point.

The story, a shaggy-dog affair that meanders shabbily from flashback to flashback, doesn’t bear much scrutiny. Ewan McGregor plays journalist Bob Wilton (a handsomer American take on Ronson himself), whose divorce-related depression leads him to the Middle East in a vague bid to prove his professional manhood, where he encounters George Clooney’s batty military tearaway Lyn Cassady, a self-proclaimed “Jedi” trained in a mystic military branch called the New Earth Army, led by dishonorably discharged hippy Bill Django (Jeff Bridges).

Prompted by a vision of Django in his dreams, Cassady heads for the desert on a wholly unspecified mission, with the sceptical-yet-curious Wilton in tow. Things get progressively frothier, and more fun, from there, as Wilton unleashes his inner “Jedi,” and the pair butt heads with Kevin Spacey’s rather more strait-laced New Earth Army commander.

It’s little more than a slender frame on which to hang a procession of gags, but the gags are good ones, and the loose-limbed enthusiasm of the cast proves infectious. In particular, it’s a delight to see Ewan McGregor once more in a lead role tailored to his gangly puppy-dog charm, and if Clooney is merely coasting on his especially droll brand of cool, he’s no less enjoyable for the lack of effort. Spacey and Bridges are similarly reprising former glories, but it’s the chemistry between the four that is the largest contributor here.

The star power on display gamely papers over the occasional pedestrian note in Heslov’s direction, which conjures up little visual interest or energy — a bit of a missed opportunity with Robert Elswit behind the camera. But it’s the eccentric patter that drives this particular vehicle to its destination: if nothing else, it’s the only war film you’re ever likely to see with an Angela Lansbury namecheck. Sometimes a movie — even one about Iraq — doesn’t need to be anything more than a good time.

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