More of this is true than you would believe.” That’s the sardonic pre-title warning that launches The Men Who Stare at Goats, a raucous and rapid-fire military comedy that channels the absurdist spirit of Catch 22 and Three Kings but is often something else entirely. Liberally adapted from the journalist Jon Ronson’s bestseller about the US Army’s crackpot dalliances with New Age spirituality, it stars Ewan McGregor as a small-fry reporter called Bob Wilton who, in 2003, lands a super-scoop on the borders of Iraq in the form of an undercover US “psychic spy” Lyn Cassady (George Clooney, rarely better). Cassady, who speaks casually of telepathic powers and invisibility, becomes Wilton’s guide through a ramshackle mission into hostile Iraqi territory and the ignominious history of a secret military division, the New Earth Army.

Thus, at a sometimes breakneck pace, we flash back to the 1980s and to the development of the New Earth Army under the tutelage of the Vietnam veteran and born-again hippy Lieutenant-Colonel Bill Django (Jeff Bridges in mellow Lebowski mode, complete with goatee and ponytail). Here soldiers are taught to worship Mother Earth, to harness their psychic powers and, via a slogan that would eventually be co-opted by the mainstream army, to “be all that you can be”. In these effortlessly off-kilter sequences the emotional grounding is provided by a paternal relationship between Django and Cassady and the tension created by the late arrival of an unctuous New Earth Army specialist, Larry Hopper, played with oddball precision by Kevin Spacey.

Meanwhile, back in vaguely modern Iraq, Wilton and Cassady face a series of increasingly lethal challenges (from cooking raw meat to escaping execution), all blithely met by Cassady’s confidence in his own “Jedi warrior” skills.

Then, halfway through the movie, something starts to change. Cassady’s powers, the source of much mirth until now, are slowly validated. From “allegedly” evaporating clouds in the desert, he predicts the location of both an Abraham Lincoln photograph and a kidnapping victim in Italy. The movie then follows him on a shamanic journey across the world. After which, in a psychic tour-de-force, he kills a farmyard goat with only the power of his own telekinetic jolt.

Ronson’s original book, naturally, wouldn’t countenance any of this poppycock, and is written in a decidedly more aghast tone. But on film, and in the context of the medium’s dark, dreamlike power, there is something utterly appropriate and indeed pleasurable about this gentle flirtation with the unknowable and the unknown. The British scriptwriter Peter Straughan and the director Grant Heslov never overplay it either. And when they finally depict Django and Wilton in the Iraqi sunset, sharing a quiet “Earth prayer”, they do it with just the right amount of syrup, they let the moment breathe — and then they undercut it, softly, with a pratfall.

In fact, if there is a flaw with Goats it’s that the movie tells the same joke too many times. By the end we are still laughing at crazy soldiers doing kooky things. But then again, when did 93 minutes of laughter become a problem?

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