The Yes Men Are Revolting, the new documentary about the activist comedians Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno (not their real names) who call themselves the Yes Men, opens with footage from their 2009 protest on New York City’s East River. Standing on the shores of Queens dressed in their ever-present, baggy thrift store suits, the Yes Men are busy corralling a dozen or so people wearing large, inflatable boy-in-a-bubble contraptions that will hopefully allow them to float over to the United Nations Headquarters just across the river on the Manhattan side. The bubble suits, which the Yes Men call SurvivaBalls, are supposedly engineered to withstand “six months of drought,” “any kind of tornado,” and a myriad of other horrible global warming–hastened natural disasters: Really they’re engineered to serve as an impossible-to-ignore joke about the dangers of climate change. As the bubble-encased actors gingerly make their way to the water, several police speedboats arrive to halt their progress. “Go towards the machine gun, and then left, and you’ll be fine!” deadpans one of the Yes Men, encouragingly, hopelessly.

It’s a good metaphor for the tenuous fate of the duo: Bichlbaum and Bonanno have been at the same antics—which typically entail impersonating high-level government or corporate officials while giving speeches that advance majorly off-brand, social-justice-embracing agendas—for 20 years. They’ve already made two films about their work: 2003’s The Yes Men and 2009’s The Yes Men Fix the World. And they’re beginning to wonder: Is the havoc they’ve made a career of wreaking actually adding up to anything more than just a few good laughs? As they get older and their lives get increasingly complicated, will they be able to navigate those murky, unpredictable currents together and remain the merry pranksters we know and love? Or will circumstance and the responsibilities of middle age force them apart?

On the surface it’s not looking good. The bubble brigade gets broken up by the police after barely setting foot in the river. In the bigger picture, Mike is now married with two kids, and a third on the way—a secret he’s keeping from Andy. He’s recently relocated to Scotland with his family, putting the Atlantic Ocean between him and his partner in crime. Back in New York, Andy is lonely, unlucky in love, and unsure how to balance his passion for activism with his desire to find a life partner. Even more troubling: The Yes Men have been served with a lawsuit by the Chamber of Commerce, who were not so amused when Andy impersonated one of its officials during a rogue press conference in D.C. and announced that the Chamber, in a stunning reversal, had decided to advocate for a carbon tax. The lawsuit could ruin them financially; perhaps more importantly, it could set a new legal precedent that would make their brand of activism difficult or impossible forevermore.

But in the face of all that personal friction and angst, the Yes Men can’t seem to stop themselves from pursuing the kind of stunts they do best—at the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, in Seattle to protest Shell’s arctic drilling initiatives, at the Amsterdam Zoo to call attention to the Russian oil company Gazprom’s drilling tactics, at a Homeland Security conference. The results are hit or miss. It takes the momentum surrounding the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement in New York to remind the guys that there’s a method to their madness, that the things they are doing are part of a much bigger picture, and that the movement, against all odds, really may stand a chance.