This dank, unpleasant A24 comedy-drama starring Nicolas Cage is currently playing in theaters. But nobody is likely to break an ankle rushing out to see it.

The film’s potentially funny premise about a dull, professionally thwarted professor and all-around mediocrity who suddenly starts turning up in many random people’s dreams, which brings him a strange kind of fame and social significance, soon drifts off course and runs aground in a swamp of uninspired topicality and failed attempts at profundity.

Cage plays Paul Matthews, a tenured professor of evolutionary biology at a small college, who somehow arrived at this secure career eminence without ever publishing — God only knows how. He’s a negligible teacher as well, unable to get his students interested in the question of the zebra’s lack of camouflage in its mostly tan environment on African savannas. In short, as we all stare at the big image of a lone, exposed zebra on the classroom screen, Paul asks why the dynamic black-and-white stripes?