Starring Will Forte. Rating unavailable

The title quote from the 1978 film Animal House represents the apex of National Lampoon’s fabled run, and the literal inability of magazine creator Doug Kenney to live up to what he had made.

This engaging dramedy is directed by Wet Hot American Summer’s David Wain, working with Penguins of Madagascar writers John Aboud and Michael Colton to adapt Josh Karp’s nonfiction book. They even manage to work in Karp’s original subtitle, How Doug Kenney and National Lampoon Changed Comedy Forever, by way of veteran comic Martin Mull, occasionally addressing the audience as Kenney, if he were alive today.

“I’m a narrative device,” Mull helpfully explains to Will Forte, who plays the troubled founder from his college years to his demise in 1980, at the Christ-like age of 33, only 10 years after the Lampoon was born. The movie premises this comic upstart’s chronic insecurity on his older brother’s childhood death. But it fails to connect such simplified psychology with his unusually ticklish funny bone. It’s likewise lax on contextualizing the anti-establishment rag’s very establishment roots as a Vietnam-era spinoff of the Harvard Lampoon, a century-old publication at the Ivy League school where Kenney met co-conspirator Henry Beard. He’s played by Ireland’s Domhnall Gleeson, unrecognizable from roles in Ex Machina, Brooklyn, and The Last Jedi.

Beard might even be the most interesting character here, but the script doesn’t really come to terms with his personality. To be fair, not that much is known about this enigmatic pipe smoker, whose WASPy hauteur dovetailed with Kenney’s Wonder Bread Midwestern roots—partially explaining the white-boy (and surprisingly non-Jewish) comedy club they formed. Natasha Lyonne plays brilliant Anne Beatts, one of few women in the inner circle of writers. Among the huge cast, Thomas Lennon and Matt Walsh stand out as ghoulish writer Michael O’Donoghue and rumpled publisher Matty Simmons, respectively.

Many key figures are necessarily dropped from the well-shot film’s 105-minute running time. There are attempts to find look-alike players to represent Gilda Radner, Chevy Chase, John Belushi, and other talents crucial to the Lampoon’s early success in print and radio—talent that was raided by Lorne Michaels in 1975 for Saturday Night Live, which eclipsed Kenney’s enterprise straight out of the gate, despite his spectacular foray into cinema with Animal House soon after. Indeed, it was the inability to top that Blutastic adventure that probably drove our flop-haired hero to his senseless end.

We offer so much background because this highly compressed Gesture depends on some prior knowledge—even to recognize that bits of the story are being told through the format of the mag itself. If you’re the right demo, do stick around for the credits, as the main cast joins Mull for a final sing-along tribute to the departed funnyman from Chagrin Falls, Ohio.