Here’s something that, as someone fortunate enough to see most of his movies for free, is all too easy to forget: what I find enjoyable in a silly, “sure, what the heck” kind of way may not be as fun for someone who’s slapped down $13 for a ticket. With that possible blindspot in mind, maybe take my praise for Lucy, writer-director Luc Besson’s latest fervid sci-fi action movie, with a grain of salt. (Perhaps a grain of Salt, too.) But yes, I found Lucy to be a wonderfully bonkers good time, a movie that manages to wring some genuine cool out of a hokey premise and messy execution.

Scarlett Johansson plays the titular hero, who begins the film rather unheroically, a flouncy foreign exchange student in Taipei, of all places, whose new boyfriend, a scuzzy, cowboy-styled Frenchman, is trying to persuade her to carry a mysterious briefcase into a hotel and give it to a mysterious man. She resists but is eventually forced, and thus begins Lucy’s fantastical journey into the mind. After she’s made to be a drug mule for a potent new product, the baggie stuck in her abdomen ruptures, giving her a mega-dose of this strange and sought-after substance. Suddenly Lucy’s brain is working in overdrive, and she’s able to do things.

See, in the film's version of science, we humans only use 10 percent of our brains, but this drug allows Lucy access to the rest of it, and as she gets more power over her noggin, she gains more power over the rest of the world. Her transformation from helpless simp to butt-kicking super being, tearing through Taiwan and Paris, is the film's key pleasure. Johansson is very good at balancing the inherent humor of this ludicrous enterprise with the ain’t-it-cool seriousness required to keep the film from becoming outright parody. In a wildly varied collection of films, Johansson has proven herself particularly responsive to, and respectful of, the tone and context of whatever movie she’s in—and she almost always makes the movie better because of it. With a less engaged actress, Lucy would be a lifeless vessel, but in Johansson’s hands, she’s mesmerizingly alive.

Though Lucy is about one person transcending our current limitations and moving into the beyond, Besson’s script is very much concerned with the nature of things as we know them now. Toward the beginning of the film, he cuts to footage of cheetahs hunting, to, in a winking way, allude to Lucy’s plight. Morgan Freeman, playing a professor of neurology (or something), gives us an illustrated lecture on consciousness and brain activity, describing for us the differences between jellyfish and cavewomen (like Lucy—get it?) and dolphins. We're even taken all the way back to the beginning of the Earth itself. Besson clearly has had these themes rattling around in his head for a while and wanted to spill them all into a movie somehow. So here’s Lucy, a brief, furious burst of ideas and action and style that doesn’t quite congeal into a thoroughly realized, or even all that comprehensible, movie, but that earns our admiration, or mine anyway, for at least trying to do something with the well-worn superhero genre.

That is, after all, what Lucy is. She’s an ordinary person made extraordinary by an accident of science—mysterious blue crystals instead of a spider bite. She is ultimately concerned not with getting revenge on the Taiwanese gangsters who put her in this position, but doing some greater good for humanity. The smarter she gets, the more she’s able to see the bigger picture, the way only an Avenger or Justice Leaguer can. Sure, her character arc may not exactly mirror the traditional guys’, but the basic structure is there. She’s more of a superhero than Black Widow is, anyway.

To my taste, Lucy is missing some of the grand, MTV House of Style weirdness of Besson’s true masterpiece, The Fifth Element. (Yes, I said masterpiece.) But Leeloo and Lucy are still sisters in arms, both heroines in the mad fever dream/thought experiments of an action-movie director who admirably aspires to more. Lucy, with all its flights of scientific fancy and its muddy, abrupt ending, will surely be met with some derision. But for my money (which, again, is none), it’s a mess that’s worth seeing. It stirs the senses, even if it doesn’t quite expand the mind.