The Men Who Stare at Goats is one of the best-titled films I’ve ever reviewed. If only it lived up to its name. To be fair to the screenwriter, Peter Straughan, and the first-time director, Grant Heslov, the subject they’ve chosen is a minefield for fair-minded adapters. They’ve drawn from a book by Welsh muckraker Jon Ronson, which was incorporated into a B.B.C. documentary, Crazy Rulers of the World, in 2004. From that title alone, one can discern how Ronson feels about the American military’s flirtation with paranormal tactics; in one flagrant example, a soldier―to paraphrase Tenacious D―reputedly killed a goat with mind bullets. (That’s telekinesis, Kyle.) This all started when Jim Channon, a combat veteran, found the military demoralized in the wake of Vietnam. He embarked on a “fact-finding mission” to determine ways in which the Army could become more “cunning.” Working for the Pentagon, he “infiltrated” the inchoate New Age movement; the result: a 1979 guidebook for military conduct which advised that soldiers enter enemy territory bearing lambs, hugs, and paeans of peace. Troopers were also to adopt Gandhi’s dietary habits, master such tricks as walking through walls, and “fall in love with everyone.”

This may sound about as efficacious as placating the Taliban with Hare Krishnas from the airport, but it struck a chord with shell-shocked vets, some of whom in high places. Soon, the military was investing in more parapsychological research than the SyFy Channel, and training a cadre of “Jedi Knights,” who had everything short of light-sabers. Straughan and Heslov catch up with these fluke Skywalkers roughly 20 years after the Knights’ formation in 1983. In this fictionalized account, Ewan McGregor plays a small-town reporter who tries to embed himself in Iraq to spite his ex-wife (who’s now married a one-armed man). He stumbles upon Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), who tells the reporter his backstory with the Jedi—illustrated for us in a series of flashbacks. Trying to get a scoop, the reporter shadows Cassady’s undercover mission, unable to determine whether his subject is a magician or a lunatic. They get kidnapped by insurgents; lost in the desert; and rescued by an offshoot of the long-disbanded Jedi, headed by Cassady’s old arch-nemesis, Hooper (Kevin Spacey), who’s kept their burnt-out guru, Django (Jeff Bridges), on retainer. But Hooper has been seduced by the dark side: He’s a private contractor. Rather than using his hippie-dippy training to stave off cruelty, Hooper is engaged in psychological torture―detainees get locked into a solitary-confinement chambers where strobe lights flash to the tune of Barney’s “I love you, you love me, we’re a happy family…”

If you don’t know how to take all this, you’re not alone; neither do the filmmakers. This talented troupe has put its faith in Heslov―a fellow actor―who co-wrote and appeared with Clooney in Good Night and Good Luck.; but Goats is bad luck. Its source material is so bizarre that it practically winks at filmmakers like a stranger with candy. But it’s Pandora’s box of chocolates―a Jedi mind trick. For the best possible outcome, you’d need someone at the controls who tore out his hair in frustration upon hearing the story―someone who could play the whole thing at a cool deadpan, with the journalist not as a skeptical advocate, but the one sane guy in the room who’s driven to meltdown. (This would suit the talents and manias of the Coen brothers beautifully; this story even has a New Age twist on fatalism.) Of course, the drawback is that this technique would require some undaunted douchebagery; and though that doesn’t necessarily preclude sympathetic Jedi, it would probably require them to be painted as self-delusional Manchurian candidates―something of a snub to people who are alive and well and have good intentions at heart. (Plus it would be a left-right faux pas, a defacement of both the support-our-troops ribbons and make-love-not-war bumper stickers.) Heslov and Straughan are simply too polite to make this material satisfying. Too genteel to make broadsides, they blow little lefty raspberries at military contractors instead—as in one clever scene, in which two rival teams of American opportunists start a firefight at a gas station and blame it on the Iraqis.

If only the filmmakers had pumped some more absurdity out of that gas-station sequence. Goats isn’t a satire—not of the Jedi at least—because the filmmakers merely transcribe events from the documentary without embellishment. They don’t expose the absurdity; they can’t find a proper tone. Are we to laugh at detainees who will contract P.T.S.D. from having the music of a prehistoric purple chanteur burned into their brains? And when they’re triumphantly set free, are we to assume they were all innocent victims who were wrongly apprehended? (Even dangerous criminals can be grossly mistreated.) Then there’s Cassady, who wants to use his powers for good, but suggests stabbing a captor’s neck with a pen as a psychological deterrent. Though consistent with the documentary, it sticks out of his characterization like a sore thumb with a razor-sharp nail. Heslov is as lost in the desert as his heroes are. He has a sturdy cinematographer (Roger Elswit) and a stellar cast (which includes a more prominent actor-director) to lean on, but he drops the ball they toss to him. Though he deserves props for his good intentions, and this exercise will hopefully teach him to put those to better use, I wish his instincts as a writer and actor had informed his direction.

But the creative shortcomings aren’t entirely the director’s fault. Straughan’s screenplay has some wit, but the framing device that compacts historical factoids into a narrative structure (McGregor’s whiney, expositional, self-involved journalist) is drably conventional, and the characters Straughan writes are about as thin. He probably didn’t know what to do with them, either; they’re a compilation of Ronson’s observations and plot-pushing clichés. The roles are beneath these actors. McGregor gets to show some range―but I wanted his reporter to get embedded with a meat grinder. Bridges is cast as the Dude, attenuated by a few-too-many White Russians. His lunkhead pleasantness suggests a hippie Santa Claus; but he doesn’t bear many gifts. We don’t get anything beneath those sad eyes, which could have been effectively used to show us the idealism at the heart of his endeavors. I recently watched Bridges play a completely different role—that of a stock-car driver in The Last American Hero (released in 1973, when the actor turned 24); Bridges suggested a depth of experience there, whereas here, pushing 60, he might as well be sitting in a mall with a sobbing kid on his lap who’s crying, “You’re not the real Jeff Bridges! You’re just an impostor in Jeff Bridges’s clothing!” Spacey, however, is an enjoyable villain; he has nothing to play with here but pettiness, but he has at least one good scene where Hooper’s jealousy comes almost to the surface. I wish, in a way, that Hooper was a complete fraud―maybe, since he’s supposed to be a failed science-fiction writer, he could have been rendered a messianic huckster like L. Ron Hubbard. His ambitions rain on the others’ parade, but he could have played a juicy Judas who’s villainized for his closed mind: a perfect target for these filmmakers, who don’t know which direction their hearts should bleed in.

That leaves us with Clooney, who brings a boyish gaucheness to his role. Like Brad Pitt, he can be great fun when he’s neurotic and nutty; Cassady is all that, with a little military repression thrown in. It’s not an easy role, but an untapped reservoir that the filmmakers—unfortunately—release only in droplets: an authoritarian nonconformist. Cassady needs positive reinforcement; he follows protocol, but his regulations are like lyrics from late-’60s folk-rock. Here’s a man who was probably a 40-year-old virgin, and, closing in on 50, his flowers remain unplucked. Goats is so determinedly lightweight that it shows him as a peppy stripling punished for dancing to the radio, and then doesn’t follow through on the implications. After being demobbed, he started a dance studio; is he a better dancer than the little hip-swinging we see suggests? Does he have a family, or friends, or any semblance of a life? You wait for Cassady to burst, but he doesn’t; all we’re left with are Clooney’s intimations, which are like promises that the filmmakers welch on. The performance is dogged but incomplete—symptomatic of an insubstantial, soft-boiled thriller. Goats is an amiable first try, but its W.T.F. premise is a mirage; all that’s left can be blown away by a little gust in a sandstorm. What else can I say? Bahh.