Like Ronson’s book, the film anchors its story in a first-person investigation, which is here led by Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor), a small-town Michigan newspaper writer who decides to become a war correspondent in Iraq as a means of getting away from the pain back home (his wife recently left him) and somehow proving himself. Stranded in a hotel in Kuwait after being denied entry into the country, he runs into a man named Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), who claims to be a contractor but is actually a former member of an elite psychic military unit who has been secretly called back into action. Sensing a great story, although still skeptical, Bob manages to talk his way into accompanying Lyn into Iraq on his secret mission.

Straughan’s screenplay kicks back and forth between past and present, interspersing Bob and Lyn’s misadventures in the desert with the backstory of Lyn’s military unit, which was called the New Earth Army by its founder, Bill Django (Jeff Bridges), an officer in Vietnam who spent seven years immersing himself in New Age hippie counterculture. Django, who Bridges plays like The Big Lebowski’s Dude if The Dude had actually cared about anything, believed that the military could prevail not with violence, but with an attitude of peace, love, and understanding ... that is backed up with finely tuned psychic abilities that turns soldiers in “warrior monks” (or, as Lyn likes to call them, “Jedis”).

By this point, Clooney has perfected the Coen-Brother-influenced art of genial goofiness, which seems to work best when accompanied by facial hair (see O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Burn After Reading versus Intolerable Cruelty), and he deploys it here with movie-star good humor. Alternately fascinating and absurd, his character always seems either two steps ahead or two steps behind everyone around him. McGregor is somewhat hamstrung as the requisite straight man who nevertheless represents the film’s emotional arc (it is, after all, his education and enlightenment we’re witnessing), while Kevin Spacey has a few good moments as a glowering military psychic with a personal vendetta against Lyn and Django’s embrace of everything flowery and ethereal.

Actor-turned-first-time feature director Grant Heslov, who cowrote Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) with Clooney and also produced Leatherheads (2008), manages the proceedings with a maximum amount of quirk, ensuring that we understand the film primarily as a satire of military culture and the extent to which it will reach in order to secure dominance. There is something inherently amusing in watching Bridges, with his waist-length braid and blissed-out eyes, telling a roomful of Army brass that the path to victory is essentially becoming one with nature, although the best moment comes when Brigadier General Dean Hopgood (Stephen Lang), who buys into Django’s premise lock, stock, and barrel, informs his superior that the Soviets are doing psychic experiments because they mistakenly believed the Americans were doing it, so now they have to start doing it to catch up with them. It’s the one moment that comes genuinely close to living up to Dr. Strangelove’s immortal “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here. This is the war room!” moment. Otherwise, The Men Who Stare at Goats gets by on its goofy, absurdist charm and gonzo characters without ever making a significant impact. It’s more scattershot than satirical, leaving us ultimately wondering if it’s making fun of its subject or presenting it as a higher calling.

Copyright ©2009 James Kendrick

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