Published in 1988, Michael Chabon's debut novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, topped the charts and connected with pop culture in that rare once-or-twice-in-a-generation way. Like Bret Easton Ellis's 1985 debut, Less Than Zero, Chabon's Mysteries charts the messy world of young adulthood, that morally ambiguous/sexually indulgent time during which boys become men and after which Nothing Will Ever Be the Same. From this well-trod terrain, Chabon spun a small wonder of a book, rich with contemporary quirkiness and adventurous sex, the majority of the latter had by our protagonist, Art, the conflicted son of a mobster whose coming-of-age summer is spiked with rampant sexual opportunity and full-penetration bisexuality.

Two decades later, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh finally makes it to the big screen, where it lands with a dull thud. Leading the charge is the venerable Peter Sarsgaard, cast as the sexy sociopath who threatens to lead young Art astray, a role he imbues with his usual mix of intelligence and menace. But Sarsgaard and the rest of the cast (which includes Sienna Miller, Mena Suvari, and Nick Nolte) are doomed to flail about in a choppy, cliché-ridden mess that feels like nothing so much as a miniseries created for Canadian television, edited down to a two-hour feature by a developmentally disabled homophobe. (The frank bisexuality that lit up the novel is nowhere to be found in the film, which downgrades Art and Cleveland's affair to a poetic, big-brother crush.)

By far the most entertaining aspect of the film is the concise eloquence it has inspired in critics, the vast majority of whom saw the same dumb mess I did. "Michael Chabon's earnest first novel from 1988 about a young man's bisexual coming of age is now what could pass for a flavorless pilot for the CW," writes the Boston Globe's Wesley Morris. Or, as the New York Post put it, "You know a movie's got problems when the most memorable thing about it is Sienna Miller's mustache."