Eric Schlosser is quick to point out that 2006 represents an important, but mostly overlooked, centennial. In his first opportunity to speak following the D.C. premiere of the movie based on his book, Fast Food Nation, Schlosser reminds the audience that it was in 1906 that Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, the classic muckraker that exposed the horrific practices of the meatpacking industry and helped prompt a major overhaul in the way they conducted their business. Schlosser evokes Sinclair to point out both the bleak and the hopeful: that after those reforms, the industry has been slowly backsliding under the collective radar, but that by raising awareness of the problem, the seeds of change can be planted. And with the release of the filmed version of his own industry exposé, Schlosser and his co-conspirator, director and co-screenwriter Richard Linklater, hope to do just that.

Schlosser and Linklater have accomplished something remarkable with Fast Food Nation, distilling a non-fiction book about the influence of fast food on the global cultural landscape into a narrative film that manages to touch on most of the many points and populaces covered in the book. Less fortunately, they’ve done so by making a film that will end up alienating much of the audience not already part of the choir and, judging from some early reviews, some of those already seated in the pews, as well.

Upon the release of his book, Schlosser says he received a landslide of interest in a movie version of the book. Most were from filmmakers interested in doing the expected: a straight documentary treatment. But in a pre-Bowling for Columbine world, where documentaries could not expect to make any money and depended heavily on corporate backing, the author worried about his bleak assertions being softened by those putting up the money. In developing the book into a narrative, fictionalized version, Linklater has made his most daring film since his cult debut, Slacker. The new film is bound to prompt comparisons to the earlier one, with its multiple, loosely related storylines, but it’s a lazy analogy. Slacker’s stories led one into another; in Nation, the threads of the plot (and there are many) jump back and forth between each other, tied together only in the loosest of ways.