If you can believe The Boys & Girls Guide to Getting Down is "a realistic window into youth culture," then it's merely one more reason to see Los Angeles and its citizens as a shallow, cultural cesspool.

The independent comedy mixes pseudo-documentary narration and how-to instructions on the L.A. party scene, a world of velvet ropes, house parties and $45 drinks, that has little relevance to anywhere outside the self-absorbed Hollywood hills.

Apparently, you can't walk into a bathroom in L.A. without being offered a line of coke. I'd hate to see how a Californian would deal with a lame Penn State party with nothing more than a fridge full of Natty Light cans.

The Guide is alternately clueless and earnest in tone, a bizarre mix which had me fooled into thinking I'd found this generation's Reefer Madness until I realized it was tongue-in-cheek.

At least, I think so. The film's tagline is "A Real Life Guide to Sex, Drugs & Bad Behavior." The typo-ridden press release calls it a "raw ethnographic study of the Los Angeles 'hispster' lifestyle."

The premise as well as the promotion (the press kit included condoms with the film's name) had me hoping for a low-profile gem, but the film is too muddled to hit that level.

Some bits are clearly just for laughs: a segment on a fictional school for bouncers, for example.

Some tips might actually be useful, like a primer on pouring cheap vodka into expensive bottles, which might actually work.

Satire or not, the mixed messages (and outright wrong facts) are troubling. The film is organized into 15 chapters and the one on drugs separates them into "sketchy" and "fun" categories, but claims ecstasy is "basically harmless."

The chapter on drunk driving cautions against it, but ignores its own words by immediately offering strategies. And the film, or the culture it's parodying, offers no lifestyle outside drugs and promiscuous sex. A morning-after segment warns partiers "you're the freaks," but then doubles back once again to say "but you probably had more fun in the last ten hours than most people have in a month." The chapter on "Sobriety" is given in 60 seconds.

The film is too goofy and unreliable to offer many practical tips and too esoteric to the self-absorbed L.A. to be particularly interesting to the rest of the world. If the film has merit, it's that it needs to be seen to be believed. A good barometer is a film-ending rap by Jonny (Dominique Purdy,) who by either actual acting ability or relative competence is the one character I enjoyed seeing pop up.

"Last night I banged a chick with a mohawk/I beat it up, she was Rodney King, I was four cops."

That's as deep as the film gets. If that's not too shallow for you, this might be worth a rental just for the experience. But make no mistake, it's nothing even approaching a cult classic, just an hour and a half of alternating chuckles and furrowed brows.

Grade: D+