After two team-ups with the seditious creative Nicolas Winding Refn, the writer and director behind the cult classic Drive and the panned Only God Forgives, heartthrob star Ryan Gosling graduated from the camera’s muse to its master. Or at least that was probably his hope stepping into the director’s chair for the first time and using his own screenplay. But if critical opinion is something you value, it appears the film criticism press has called his bluff. Lost River, his debut feature film, has had every insult in the book thrown at it. At best, they say, it’s an all right imitation of other filmmaker’s art; a hollow, meandering, lifeless work without an original idea, thought, or creative idea in its pretentious innards. Even generous reviews label it the equivalent of a derivative arthouse stir-fry of Refn, David Lynch, Terrence Malick, and Dario Argento.

On many levels I agree. Look to a mid-film sequence with Ben Mendelsohn unsubtly models Dean Stockwell’s famous lip-syncing performance of Roy Orbison’s In Dreams, the iconic scene from the landmark nightmarish noir Blue Velvet. A colleague correctly pointed out the color pallette steals the instagram look of Spring Breakers. The volume on Gosling’s references are so loud they distract to the point of deafening what’s new and authentic, a probable reason why River has been hailed as a catastrophe by some.

The plot is a Grimm’s Fairy Tale in the crumbling city of Detroit, where empty houses span for miles. A single mother (Christina Hendricks) is raising two kids: Gosling lookalike played by Iain De Caestecker as well as a baby, and they live in debt and fear losing their house. A predictably grimy banker (Ben Mendelsohn) offers the mother a job at a nightclub with implications of sexual exploitation. The elder child might’ve been played by Gosling were he 10 years younger, and, like all the characters, he has an unworldly name that sounds like southern legend brought to life: Bones. Hendricks is Billy, Doctor Who’s Matt Smith plays a local gangster named Bully, and Bones lusts on his gorgeous neighbor named Rat (Saoirse Ronan). She owns a rat. The overall thrust of the story is broad, with a group of helpless kids trying to make it in a world that doesn’t want to let them. They have an out, and whether it’s urban myth (though the whole film is fashioned to seem like one) or dreamy logic, Bones is told if you retrieve a piece from a sunken city it’ll break the spell on their town and they can finally escape it.