The phrase "Inherent Vice" refers to "the tendency in physical objects to deteriorate because of the fundamental instability of the components of which they are made, as opposed to deterioration caused by external forces"—a mouthful that refers simultaneously to the characters, their city, their nation, and the particular historical period that has defined all of it, and that is already passing into memory when "Inherent Vice" begins. (Exhales smoke rings.) It's set in Los Angeles circa 1970, after Tet and Altamont and Manson so many other time-and-place names that viewers of a certain age will recognize as markers of the point where '60s Utopianism morphed into '70s numbness. In his gonzo epic "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," Hunter S. Thompson referred to the Summer of Love in 1967 as, in retrospect, the point where the great wave of the counterculture "broke and finally rolled back."

The film's hero, the pothead private investigator Larry 'Doc' Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix), is standing on the beach waiting for the tide to return. He's a shaggy-haired, mutton-chopped man-child, a little bit piggish in the way that a lot of hippie guys were then, but basically decent; he wouldn't hurt a fly unless he thought the fly was bogarting his joint, maybe not even then. He blurts out sentences that are non-sequiturs to everyone but him, and makes high-pitched strangled sounds, a la Ben Braddock in "The Graduate," when he's frustrated. He's the kind of guy who might preface an important fact with "dig this," and who can say "right on" in response to any statement, varying the inflection so it always seems an acceptable answer. He solves cases intuitively, reading life as others might read tea leaves. The closeups of his detective's notepad reveal such phrases as "Paranoia alert" and "Something Spanish." It's a method, a process; it's his way, man. Yeah, fine, it doesn't often seem to yield visible results. But that's all part of it, you know? Because we're all too obsessed with results, with solving for "X," with explaining things and answering things. Right?

Oh—you want to know what the movie is about? Dig this: "Vice" is not the kind of movie whose plot you can flow-chart, or that will benefit terribly much from the inevitable click-baiting "explainer" pieces that are sure to be written about it in the coming months. The movie starts with Doc being visited by his ex-girlfriend Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston), now the girlfriend of local real estate bigwig Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts). She wants Doc to thwart plans by Mickey's wife and her lover to have Mickey committed to a mental institution. Around the same time, coincidentally and strangely, a brother named Tariq Khalil (Michael Kenneth Williams, right on) visits Doc at his medical office (he's some kind of physician, seemingly?) and asking if Doc can help find one of Mickey's bodyguards, Glen Charlock, a white supremacist who did time with Tariq. Because Doc can't seem to walk down the street without being handed a case or a mission or asked for a favor, he also tries to locate the disappeared jazz saxophonist Coy Harlingen (Owen Wilson, who seems born to hold a sax, if not necessarily to play it) on behalf of Coy's wife Hope (Jena Malone).