Boys will be boys. Badass car-building, homemade flamethrower manufacturing, violent bloody knife-rape fantasizing boys. And in Bellflower, girls, if they know what’s good for them, will forgive their wounded men the transgressions that spring from their inability to fit into a society that no longer values their physical strength or pities their pain.

The debut feature from writer/director/star/car-builder/camera modifier/jack-of-all-trades Evan Glodell, one of the sweethearts of Sundance earlier this year, has inspired a host of divergent interpretations. One camp claims that it’s an ambitious apocalypse-inflected examination of what’s left of 21st century machismo. Others have called it out as a disgusting attempt to vindicate the misogynistic impulses of boys who refuse to emotionally become men.

There’s little denying that the two male leads represent the latter impulse. Woodrow (Glodell) and Aiden (Tyler Dawson) are a pair of Wisconsin transplants to southern California, obsessed with Mad Max, and determined to build a car so cool it would make a young Mel Gibson weep and a flamethrower that would give them Lord Humungus-like dominion over the apocalyptic wastelands that are inevitably right around the corner. They spend all their spare time experimenting with the incendiary properties of various fuels and shooting off shotguns on the edges of L.A., until Woodrow meets Milly (Jessie Wiseman), a tough and flirty blonde, at a bar and falls in love during a spontaneous Texas roadtrip.

Wait, did I say “spare” time? Scratch that, because that would suggest that they have something that occupies most of their time that makes the rest of it “spare.” Woodrow and Aiden, like every single character in this film, exists in a strange land where things such as “jobs” and “money” don’t seem to exist. No one ever goes to work or talks about work, and Aiden and Woodrow are building a custom car and serious hardware that must require thousands of dollars in parts, with no mention of where this cash is coming from. Indeed, Glodell actually engineered many of these creations himself for the movie, and in the real world, nearly bankrupted himself in the process.

Glodell also developed many of the unusual camera setups, combining old lenses and custom modifications with a digital camera to create the film’s distinctive look. Hailed as visionary in some quarters, I can’t help but think that those quarters haven’t spent much time on the internet in the past couple of years. Most of Glodell’s effects — hyper-saturated colors, selective focus, grime on the lens — look much like popular smartphone vintage photography filters. This is essentially Instagram-inspired cinematography; there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, and it does create striking images, but it doesn’t seem particularly groundbreaking. Moreover, the visual quirks are entirely necessary to distract from some absolutely leaden performances.

The happy young and dirty love vibe of the first half of the film transitions suddenly after a time jump (marked by some unfortunate facial hair decisions on the part of Woodrow), when our hero, already on the downswing of his relationship with Milly, has his heart broken in spectacularly humiliating fashion. What follows is a descent into a violent revenge fantasy that may be an attempted statement on the fragile masculinity of the modern man.

I call bullshit. The events of the film prior to its coda could have been the preparation for a real indictment of the hateful actions that Woodrow — suddenly transformed from the childlike puppy dog of the film’s first half into a moody maelstrom of dark and dangerous emotion — engages in during the film’s shocking climactic scenes. But the film never follows through.

I’m not saying that because a movie centers on hateful characters, that it necessarily endorses their actions. I’ve long defended In the Company of Men and Fight Club from similar allegations, because I believe that Neil LaBute and David Fincher firmly denounce their protagonists as the arrested development psychos that they really are. But watching Bellflower, there’s a distinct impression that its maker didn’t realize Fight Club was ridiculing outdated conceptions of masculinity, tried to make a similar movie for Millenials — only without taking its characters to task for their real or imagined misdeeds.

Instead, we find our heroes retreating to their juvenile fantasy, identifying yet again with Mad Max‘s brutal Humungus, and planning a future of traveling around small towns and impressing the locals with their cool car and using women for the disposable, servile creatures they believe them to be.

Most people will recoil from the diatribe. And even if Glodell himself might also recoil from it, the biggest problem with his film is that it never does. While it never explicitly endorses this closing monologue, there is a tacit approval in letting these characters end this way, particularly when accompanied by the image of a woman savaged by Woodrow tenderly forgiving him.

Still, in a cinematic climate where bland compromise is often the rule, Bellflower may be impressive simply for its unapologetic willingness to be so bile-raising. It’s a bold conversation piece, and does manage to make the most out of limited resources. I actually find myself wanting to talk to people about how angry it made me. That’s enough, oddly, for me to give a backhanded endorsement, finding myself in the unusual position of reluctantly recommending that people see and discuss a movie that, in the end, I found irredeemable and more than a little nausea-inducing.

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Bellflower
Written and directed by Evan Glodell
Starring Evan Glodell, Jessie Wiseman, Tyler Dawson, Rebekah Brandes
Running time: 106 minutes
Rated Rated R for disturbing violence, some strong sexuality, nudity, pervasive language and some drug use.
Opens today at E Street Cinema.