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How to Lose Friends and Alienate People is a nicely sarcastic take on celebrity culture, though its own methods undermine its rebellious spirit.

Like Wedding Crashers and The 40-Year-Old Virgin before it, the story engine operating at the core of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People is that of a romantic comedy: fish out of water, meet-cute, adorable shared animosity, and then the protagonist ultimately gives up enticing but hollow pursuits to go with the person they should be with. It’s just that, as with those movies, that lead is now male.

That male is Sidney Young (Simon Pegg), an acerbic British magazine publisher whose Post Modern Review covers the silliness of celebrity culture in England. He’s a hapless loser at his job but funny, so megastar publisher Clayton Harding (Jeff Bridges) hires him to work at a New York magazine that’s meant to be, I don’t know, Vanity Fair. The hollow pursuit is dim-but-pretty actress Sophie Maes (Megan Fox, going for the Marilyn Monroe sans presence vibe), whom Sidney desperately wants to take to bed. The woman he argues with and—inevitably—comes to love is his coworker Alison (Kirsten Dunst). Pretty standard fare.

But that’s only if you strip away the humor. While the very standard romance is going on, happily picking up the requisite plot coupons to give the whole thing a story to hang itself on, How to Lose Friends is happily taking potshots at celebrity culture and the journalists who all-too-happily play along just to get a seat at the table. The scene of Young looking on while PR queen Eleanor Johnson (Gillian Anderson) edits his feature on her pet director had me cringing. I told my friend Joe to shoot me if I ever let a flack take a red pen to my work.

Which is all well and good; when I tell people I want to do entertainment journalism for a living, I must quickly stress that I mean I want to cover art, not celebrities. Such is life in the E! age, where the storytelling apparatus seems to be in place to prop up the gossip industry, allowing the rest of the country to behave as if it’s still in high school. You may be able to tell I don’t have a lot of patience for that side of the industry.

So, if it’s aimed at anyone, How to Lose Friends is aimed at people like me: People who still believe in the basic integrity of storytelling but who feel compelled to rail against all those who’d cheapen it for what we perceive to be lesser goals. Young is that guy: he’s boldly irreverent, to the point of laughing in the face of Eleanor and openly defying Harding, who once upon a time used to be less like a PR tyrant and more like Young himself. More power to him.

But detect that subtle irony: a major Hollywood movie featuring major Hollywood players (cult darling Pegg aside) dissing the hollowness of so much Hollywood fare. A movie whose ambition is to rip into the prevailing movies-as-factory-product thinking that welds itself to a paint-by-numbers rom-com plot. This is a movie at war with itself.

Movies like this are meant to make people like me stand up and cheer, but I was aware of that, even as I laughed. Often and with genuine feeling. I don’t want to say How to Lose Friends pandered, exactly, but it did get close. There’s much real wit here, real observation and real feeling, but the final package is a little too neat to cut as close to the bone as it obviously wants to. Maybe it’s impossible for a truly transgressive movie to be as slick as this one.

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