No other film is like David Fincher’s revolutionary, mad, incendiary Fight Club. It was a tectonic shift in film aesthetics and moral value, a The Graduate for the millennials, constantly attacking the status quo. It’s hard to leave Fight Club without rethinking what controls you and why, and how loud of a voice you are in your own head. It’s too bad it’s only as mature as an adolescent’s wet dream.

Fight Club stormed theaters with a loaded deck, betraying viewer expectations with a daring and abrasive story and tone that left them scrambling what to think. The studio marketed the Brad Pitt and Edward Norton film like a boxing movie for the Fast and Furious crowd. Needless to say, audiences were not pleased. What they got was a rampantly homo-erotic fascist fantasy, one obsessed with destroying consumerism like Alexander Supertramp but with a van full of dynamite, peering down a rabbit hole of social anarchy. Based on Chuck Palahniuk’s book of the same name, Fight Club is a story about how an underground fight ring slowly mutated into a terrorist cell. This is not a spoiler, since an elaborate tracking shot that impossibly glides in and out of buildings shows explosives wired to blow at least one massive skyscraper. The opening, like a lot of the film, is narrated dryly by Edward Norton. He tells us everything—the controlled demolition, the revolution, him and Tyler—all has something to do, like The Graduate, with a girl. Her name is Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter).

The narrator’s miserable, pathetic existence is an ironic FU to the American Dream. He has everything, but his life is desolate. He has a successful high paying corporate job that allows him to live a reasonably lavish lifestyle, complete with a sofa with a string green stripe pattern. But in bit Marxist-Buddhist philosophy also shown in The Matrix and American Beauty, the narrator’s stuff does not make him happy. In fact, he’s miserable. He suffers from insomnia: he’s “never really asleep, but never really awake.” His ability to feel, to be alive, has been neutered. He’s achieved the American Dream, but it’s left him impotent in his ability to live. In an effort to feel something, anything, he pretends to have diseases like prostrate cancer and shows up to self help groups. He becomes addicted to crying at them. Not long after, thanks to übermensch Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), he finds catharsis in fighting. Tyler has a body sculpted like the Greek gods. He’s incredibly stylish but totally at ease, and he’s everything the narrator, and most men (so the film naively accuses), want to be. He also thinks he’s a prophet for nihilistic mayhem; so he, along with the narrator, start a fight club. It soon becomes Project Mayhem, a terrorist cell.