A slightly more long-winded and unproductive effort than the War on Drugs, the Culture Wars have raged especially hard in recent years, as outspoken ideologues of all stripes have railed against the scourge of cultural insensitivity. Others, however, have taken up arms against those that dare to object to material deemed offensive, invoking First Amendment rights and more sweeping, chilling-effect rationales over informal thought policing. It’s an embittered debate, with a grain of truth to either side of the argument: one of the most prized American freedoms is our right to challenge, subvert, and occasionally rub the wrong way, but at the same time, it eventually reaches a point where self-expression crosses over into hate-speech, or other legitimately objectionable extremes. A nuanced issue without any easy answers or empirically correct solutions, the cultural-sensitivity debate has grown more controversial with every stand-up comedian’s cancelled college gig.

And indeed, comedy has been among the most heated battlegrounds in this war. Documentarian Ted Balaker has taken up the cause of the persecuted comedian for his new project Can We Take A Joke?, planting himself firmly on the “everyone just needs to take it easy” camp. Alarmed by recent scuffles involving Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and the college students who rejected them as on-campus performers due to material they found offensive, Balaker took it upon himself to make a case for the humorists. With narration from comedian Christina Pazsitzky and supplementary interviews with lightning-rod comics Gilbert Gottfried, Penn Jillette, Lisa Lampanelli, Adam Carolla, Jim Norton and Heather McDonald, Balaker hopes to return to the simpler time of 2010, when a comedian could joke about racial, sexual, or gender themes without fear of backlash.

Samuel Goldwyn Films is now enabling his quest by purchasing Can We Take A Joke? for national distribution in theaters and on digital platforms. In a statement to Deadline, Samuel Goldwyn Films President Peter Goldwyn said, “We at Samuel Goldwyn Films are outraged that the outrage has gotten this far and are thrilled to work with Ted Balaker on his eye-opening and profound film on how free speech is under siege, not just in the comedic world but in all facets of life.”

To that, Balaker himself added, “I’m thrilled that Samuel Goldwyn Films will be our distributor. The timing is a bit surreal because it is the 50th anniversary of the death of Lenny Bruce, the godfather of stand-up comedy and hero of our film; in our age of instant outrage and kneejerk censorship, we need Lenny’s influence now more than ever.” While it is true that Bruce was the original martyr for the comedian’s right to rile, the cultural context of this debate has changed in a big way since the ’60s. Bruce was a hit with young people, rebels, and other cultural subversives and denounced by the old guard, whereas now the generational split has cast millennials as the self-appointed guardians of the national conscience, while older folks bemoan the evils of censorship.

All that is to say that everyone will have plenty to get angry about when the film makes its debut at the end of the summer, on a date still to be announced. Boomers shall grumble about millennials, millennials shall grumble about boomers, Gen-Xers shall grumble about their mortgage payments, and teens shall forgo attendance of the film in favor of catching it on Netflix whenever it comes around.

Correction: An earlier version of this article identified MGM as the film's distributor, and has since been revised to Samuel Goldwyn Films.