Unorthodox and covert military practices easily lend themselves to dark comedy. And when military bigwigs seek to outwit and beat combatants harnessing a range of paranormal and psychic powers, the potential for outlandish fun looms large.

Based loosely on Jon Ronson's weirdly funny book of the same name, the film has some of the farcical appeal and subversive wit of Dr. Strangelove.

But its daffy humor – much of it provided by the deliciously loony performance of George Clooney– is sporadic. The unconventional tale derails about midway through, wittiness dissipates and the story becomes a tedious road movie. Things perk up again in the final third when Jeff Bridges lends his outrageous, faintly Lebowskian presence.

A word about that mouthful of a title: It refers to a training exercise in which a soldier believed to have superstar psychic abilities was said to have killed a goat simply by staring at it. The military supposedly kept a herd of the animals penned in a clandestine location just to experiment with this mind-control murder technique.

Grant Heslov, who wrote the masterful Good Night, and Good Luck, makes his directorial debut with this challenging military satire.

While on the trail of a much more prosaic story, journalist Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) stumbles on to the use of experimental psychic phenomena in secret military quarters.

Having been dumped by his wife for their mutual newspaper editor, Bob is unexpectedly at loose ends. He is also fascinated by the implications of the story he's uncovering.

Impulsively, he dives into investigating the use of psychic powers against a military enemy, egged on by the enigmatic dreamweaver of a "New Earth Army" fighter, Lyn Cassady (Clooney). Cassady speaks in utter seriousness about throwing an enemy off guard by greeting him with "sparkly eyes." He also is the one who bores his killer eyes into the eponymous goat.

The story bounces between the Vietnam-era '70s, to the '80s and ultimately to 2003 and the Iraq War. The movie's structural unevenness may be a result of screenwriter Peter Straughan's addition of fictional elements to Ronson's droll and purportedly factual account of the U.S. military's experiment with using mental and psychic skills for combat.

Wilton was not in the book, but those who lead him through the maze of oddball projects are based on actual military personnel.

The scenarios posited are just specific and bizarre enough to be convincing, luring the audience into its weirdly tangled web.

This is the anti-Hurt Locker experience: Where that Iraq War film was absorbing and deadly serious, The Men Who Stare at Goats is irreverent and lighthearted.

One only wishes it were a more consistently funny film.

Enlarge By Laura Macgruder, Overture Films Meet The Men: Jeff Bridges, left, Tim Griffin, Kevin Spacey, George Clooney and Nick Offerman try to use psychic powers as a weapon.