Could any film ever hope to overcome a festival drubbing like the one that greeted Southland Tales at Cannes 2006? Screened in competition, in an early incarnation clocking in at 2 hours 40 minutes (director Richard Kelly later claimed it had been a rough cut all along, but that’s apparently not how it was billed to the press at the time), Kelly’s follow-up to the slow-burning cult hit Donnie Darko was roundly, emphatically, infamously booed. Sometime after the first shockwave of bad buzz hit the States, a handful of critics rose to defend Kelly’s vision. The rest of us sat back and waited a year and a half to get a look for ourselves.

Southland Tales may never be able to live down that first, fateful, fatal screening, but you can’t say Richard Kelly didn’t try to reverse the damage; in fact, he spent a good portion of the 18 months following the film’s ill-fated premiere streamlining his disasterpiece. The 2 hour 24 minute cut premiering in theaters tomorrow boasts a newly-fashioned prologue (wherein a July 4th barbecue is interrupted by a mushroom cloud, touching off World War III), a re-recording of Justin Timberlake’s narration (stoney and oblique, but purposefully so), and the exorcism of one or two subplots (Janeane Garofalo used to be in this film; now she is not).

Most auspiciously, Kelly brokered a deal with Sony that required him to shave a sizable chunk off the running time in exchange for their bankrolling of 90 new effects shots. It would seem that this money was put to good use: I’m not someone who usually takes much pleasure from good CGI, but if there’s one thing we should all be able to agree on when it comes to Southland Tales, it’s that the effects are truly special. Particularly in the film’s spectacular final twenty minutes, Southland Tales contains some of the most purely beautiful digital effects that I’ve ever seen on a big screen.

And the rest of it? It really comes down to what you’re willing to let Kelly get away with.

Southland Tales takes place in a very near future: Summer 2008, exactly three years after a hypothetical nuclear attack off the coast of Texas. It turns out that eight months from now looks a lot like now, only, to paraphrase Wristcutters: A Love Story’s description of the afterlife, a little bit shittier. Kelly has imagined a post-“American Hiroshima” era as a fin de siecle immersed in the full-scale pornofication of mainstream culture. Porn stars are the new multi-hyphenates, complete with afternoon chat shows and branded energy drinks; a commercial for a massive SUV run on alternative fuel features digital simulations of the monstrous vehicles copulating; the war itself is sponsored by Bud Light and Hustler. And all that isn’t directly sexual is so vulgar that it might as well be: pseudo-science and inescapable surveillance replace religion and capitalism as the respective ideological driving force and the vehicle of a corrupt political administration, while celebrity of any sort is apparently the gateway drug to domestic terrorism.

It’s a film so rich with narrative detail that what seem like loglines for entire films are dropped carelessly as incidental set-up—something here about an election rigged via severed thumbs; something there about “soldiers reporting metal telepathy on the battlefield.” There’s a whole lot of plot about alternative energy begetting an alternative power structure, which involves a perpetual motion machine invented and controlled by a psychotic, vaguely European scientist (played by Wallace Shawn, essentially transposing Vizzini to the 21st century). This contraption, called Fluid Karma, produces an oil substitute that, when injected, literally doubles as a drug. I think. I imagine this might improve on repeat viewings, but Southland Tales is too narratively confused to make sense as a linear experience on the first go round.

An early joke posits Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman holding down the inconsequential Democrat side of an election ticket, and this is a fair representation of most of Kelly’s satire: it’s largely laughable, but also semi-prescient. While I don’t think I’m willing to buy most of Kelly’s political pretensions, there is something about the balls-out absurdity of his cultural juxtapositions that I like a lot. If taken a little bit less literally than I think he wants us to, Kelly’s future might already be here.

Admittedly, there’s a sense that Kelly, as others have noted, has programmed Southland Tales to be above critique: you can’t say this film is “bad”, because it’s about being “bad”––it’s a cautionary tale about the inevitable endgame of tasteless, artless, “alternative” culture. For all that it attempts to say about the fix we’re in, Southland Tales is ultimately built around the joke that prophesies can be foretold in the lyrics of Jane’s Addiction.

“Three Days”, Perry Farrell’s loving 11-minute ode to a heroin-fueled menage a trois, has here been re-purposed as a guidebook for the apocalypse. Kelly can only get away with this because Southland Tales is set in a world in which Perry Farrell-as-auteur doesn’t exist, whilst all the while the Jane’s Addiction frontman’s post-Me Generation, corporate-sponsored hippie spirit, and the trash-goth aesthetics of his late-80/early-90s heyday, governs the realm of Kelly’s critique. Kelly’s most daring conceit is to lump environmental boosters in with shitty Venice Beach performance artists and bloated, racist cops as common frauds, and part of the problem. Wrestlers-turned-action stars, actors-turned-veterans, and porn stars-turned-prophets––all with ludicrous catch phrases, advertising lyrics and song lyrics as their primary weapons––represent the only hope for a solution.

In the film’s press notes, Kelly says he set Southland Tales in Southern California’s cultural sewers in an attempt to live up to the film noir’s seedy tradition, and oddly, if there’s one high-ish cultural mode that his characters are familiar with, it’s noir–judging by how many times it pops up on TV screens here, Kiss Me Deadly is the only film that survived the bomb. But with Kelly taking so many shots at various facets of rancid counter-culture, I wonder if he’s not aiming to shatter the post-Darko cultural suppositions foisted on him against his will. Kelly, a former frat boy, has always seemed a bit bewildered that Darko became a sensation amongst hipsters, goths, and countless youth cults. Southland Tales may fail on a lot of levels, but it’s fairly successful as an epic satire on the very notion of “alternative” culture. In practice, the Darko faithful may be the only viewers who will have patience enough to deconstruct Kelly’s vision, but I suspect that he’s not playing to his base so much as trying to shake it.