I wish I had smuggled the Polaroid snapshot of Nolte from my former employer, a men’s homeless shelter. Nolte wasn’t his real name, but I’ll be damned if the scruffy, gin-blossomed, gravel-voiced Vietnam veteran wasn’t a ringer for Nick Nolte playing a Nam burnout. He wore mirror shades and ratty field jacket festooned with medals and POW/MIA buttons. He complained that the thunder erupting from the building’s boiler at night gave him jungle flashbacks. There are cliches and there are cliches. Beyond the impossibility of his extreme Nolte-ness and 1,000 yard silences, the man was really suffering. One time he lifted his shades to show me.

Yesterday I was shocked to see Nolte again, up on the big screen in Tropic Thunder. This was my Nolte. A Nam vet whose acclaimed book of war stories inspires a cash-in film adaptation, the character played by Real Nolte emerges on the troubled set like Quint in Jaws, leading our comic heroes not out to sea but into the heart of darkness. In a shot mournfully photographed by John Toll, Nolte stares out at the jungle mists from a mountain perch and answers a query about a weapon with, “I don’t know what it’s called, but I know the sound that it makes when it takes a man’s life.” It’s like, out of nowhere, ten seconds of Malick or Herzog. Later on, Nolte’s heart-of-darkness act and its function in American mythology get deconstructed (or demolished) like Warren Beatty’s frontier pimp in McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

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There seems to be a lot of eye-rolling over Kimberley Pierce’s Stop-Loss, as if there’s some kind of collective embarrassment over the fact that this highly-stylized policy polemic––literally, an MTV Film––is seeing the light of day so many months after last fall’s D.O.A. Iraq movie wave. Mainstream reviews have so far been mixed, and blog chatter has (predictably) skewed towards suspicious, but there’s one potential audience sector that’s apparently not ready to write it off yet: actual veterans.

In a post at Eat the Press on military media, Rachel Sklar points to this post at VetVoice.com, where members of the community weigh in on the Stop-Loss trailer. Of the 17 comments on the post as of this writing, most express some interest in seeing the film, even if it’s just to justify the commenter’s previously held assumptions that Hollywood is ideologically out of touch and, in terms of military accuracy, either willfully ignorant or just plain incompetent. As ThisDudesArmy puts it, “Me and some buddies are going opening day. Planning on laughing at all the inaccurate hoopla. Just from one promo picture I saw, there were two guys in a parade with CIBs, but no combat patch. Yikes!” Another commenter argues that even if a movie like this gets details wrong, he/she will still pay money to see it because “If the mainstream media is going to continue to keep Iraq off the public’s radar screen, then culture has to pick up the ball.”

But accuracy might be a double-edged sword. As clejeune puts it in a comment titled “Would love to see it, but won’t”: “Movies like this are either too hokey, and I pick them apart, or they are way too real, and I’m up all night.” It’s a losing proposition either way. Are contemporary war films failing because we’re asking them to strike a balance––in terms of political stance, in terms of moral address, in terms of realism––that may be impossible to achieve?