Time to slip into something black, make a few wry observations and smoke a French cigarette, because Kris Kramski's really back. Kramski crafts grim vistas peopled with the sort of characters you want to stay far the fuck away from, lest the stench of Life's Loser that trails them like a starved puppy rubs off on you. Gone - or maybe just lying dormant - are the tendencies toward shock tactics he seemed so enamored of a few years ago; absent as well are the purposely un-erotic sex scenes he traditionally favors. In fact, all of the sex here is conventional and surprisingly vanilla - a little too much so for this reviewer.

Kramski infuses his Euro-pretentious script with grandiose blocks of rhetoric about razing this oh-so-horrible, hypocritical, consumer-obsessed country called America to the ground and enjoying the sexual tabula rasa that will spring from its ashes. Mickey G. outdoes himself as one of Kramski's premier have-nots; a failed writer who's barely existing in a filthy apartment in downtown Los Angeles. Using his saggy jowls and defeated eyes to maximum, nom-worthy effect, Mickey's days are spent in a bunny suit to attract customers to an nth-rate shoe store. His girlfriend Lola is faring marginally better; she's about to be fired from the "American Excess" credit card company. Lola manages to walk away with a sweet severance pay package, thanks to a blackmail-inspired blowjob administered to her boss, Brick Majors. Mickey's not that inventive; wandering around L.A. in a miasma of misery, he meets cynical street musician Jeremy Steele and his girlfriend Dayton. The couple fuck distractedly while Mickey jacks off, musing about creating "a microcosm of society. Freedom is our only rule."

And our delusional, downtrodden hero finally has a reason for being.

After walking in on his lovely partner screwing Tony Tedeschi, Mickey's sanity begins to crack, revealing a budding (yet verbally persuasive) megalomaniac. "No rules, no limits, no shame," he intones, joining in the sexual fray.

And so the journey begins. Mickey gathers up a bunch of his and Lola's bored, sexually repressed friends and convinces them to secure an old school bus and a house in the desert to build their hippie paradise. They'll grow their own food. Live off the land. Cast off the shackles of traditional relationships. Sure, why not? Look how well it worked out for the Manson Family.

The most enthusiastic of the bunch is Gino Greco, married for 12 years to needy, irritating Tasha Hunter. Call him the Rimbaud of under-the-newspaper bus stop masturbators, 'cause he needs a new noise. Hunter yearns for domestic bliss, but chooses to follow her errant husband on his adventure; soon she's engaged in a threeway with Dayton and Tedeschi, working one of those Know Mind twisty glass dildos into Dayton's asshole.

Once they make it to the desert, the whole plan falls apart faster than you can say "Jerry Garcia's rotting corpse." The story feels rushed from this point on as well, though it offers a good couples match-up between Mickey and Heather Lyn, the only convert left. Maybe they should have brought less dogma and more acid.

Fuckin' hippies.