The most unsettling thing about Fast Food Nation is that the fictional characters—the big-time marketing exec, the meat packing immigrants, the peon cashier—are all complicit in a complex not-so-fictional snapshot of America.

The movie, directed by Richard Linklater and based on Eric Schlosser’s best-selling book, is funny and sad, entertaining and disturbing. The low budget film features Kris Kristofferson, Bruce Willis, Ethan Hawke, Patricia Arquette and pop rocker Avril Lavigne, all of whom worked for next to nothing to see the movie completed, Schlosser said at a recent screening.

The drama skillfully interweaves the lives of people who service, often with robot-like obedience, America’s love affair with drive-thru convenience, examining the public health issues and social injustice under the surface—or in the meat—of the industry.

“This is realism, depicting the world as it really is. It’s about discomfort,” Schlosser said.

In the movie, Mickey’s is America’s most popular fast-food chain. “The Big One” is the hamburger that hit a home run with the help of marketing whiz kid Don Henderson, aptly played by Greg Kinnear.

Don travels to Cody Colorado to inspect a little problem at the meatpackers: independent tests show that the frozen Big One beef patties, Don’s brainchild, contain dangerously off-the-chart levels of fecal matter. That’s right—Mickey’s beef is the shit.

Linklater—director of Slacker, Dazed and Confused, School of Rock—has consistently delivered politically subversive comedy with a crafty, anti-elitist intellectualism, and he pulls no punches once the Fast Food characters converge on Cody, an anywhere American town with a main drag featuring McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, Papa John’s and, of course, Mickey’s.

Cody is a site of hopeless compromise and tragic entrapment. Undocumented meat laborers avoid working the “kill floor” and endure a gruesome mishap with a “cattle max” machine. Audiences will cringe.

The movie is visually colorful and thematically grim, respectfully translating Schlosser’s meticulous investigative reporting into cinematic storytelling.

Perhaps expecting a documentary adaptation, some Schlosser loyalists have become detractors, calling the film “too watered down.”

Though difficult to imagine, Schlosser concedes that the cattle industry is actually bleaker than portrayed in the movie.

“The plants I visited slaughtered about 350 cattle per hour. The one in the film slaughters only 175 per day,” he said.

Schlosser, who co-wrote the screenplay with Linklater and gave the filmmaker full creative license, said the meatpacking plant used in the film is in Mexico and that the owners consented to filming to draw attention to immigrant working conditions at U.S. plants.

Schlosser said he has no idea how the movie will do at American box offices, but he expects a positive reaction in overseas markets.

“Let’s see if America can deal with it,” he said.

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Ian Thomas is a San Francsico-based reporter and videographer, executive editor of the Golden Gate [X]press, San Francisco State’s student press, and a correspondent for the Oakland Tribune. Thumbnail image courtesy Drew at toothpaste for dinner.