Like many, at first I dismissed Harmony Korine’s 1995 screenplay for Larry Clark’s Kids and his 1997 directorial debut Gummo (as well as the follow ups Julian Donkey Boy and Trash Humpers) as sordid shock mongering; his fascination with the degenerate behavior of the bungled and the botched coming off as risible hipster sneering. But as usual, I may have been slightly wrong.

The thing is, it’s easy to sneer at cool-kid satire when it’s sealed in its own closed loop of elitist appreciation; hermetic hipster irony for elitist ironic hipsters. However, it can serve a purpose when it sneaks and slides into the pop-culture mainstream as Korine has done with his latest film, Spring Breakers.

Korine may be actively courting dismissive scorn when he goes out of his way to shock and disgust in films like Gummo and Trash Humpers, but re-watching those films, it becomes clear he’s not lazily tossing filth and impotent fury at easy targets. Despite its scattershot feel, Korine’s work is deceptively thoughtful, offering up through stylistic choices, a carefully constructed artistic thesis on, around, and underneath its subjects.

For example, with its eye-catching overture of sweaty, oil-soaked flesh gyrating in the sun, Spring Breakers—released last month as millions of college students headed south to Cancun and Panama City—wants to lure in viewers with the promise of sex, beer, and vicarious thrills.

But for all the bared bods and keg stands on display up front, writer-director Korine has something more insidious in mind; his version of spring break is ultimately neither voyeuristic escapism, nor a pedantic morality tale. Instead, with more in common with Martha Marcy May Marlene than teen sex flicks of the ‘80s, Spring Breakers is a hypnotically nuanced, and surprisingly heady exploration of the very narcissistic nihilism it appears to wallow in.

The story follows four college girls (including former Disney teen queens Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens alongside Pretty Little Liars‘ Ashley Benson and Korine’s own wife Rachel Korine) whose desperation to get to St. Petersburg, Florida, for the annual higher-education bacchanal drives them to rob a chicken hut restaurant. Once having joined the lotus eaters down south, the ladies first luxuriate in the hazy joy of reality-TV aspirations come true: the Perfect Life in the Sun.

But an arrest (for drug possession, not their prior stick up) lands them on the seedier side of the dream, in the real St. Pete, where they fall into orbit around a charismatic street hustler and white gangsta-rapper named Alien (the mercurial and talented James Franco). As quickly as the women embraced the idyllic fantasy of spring break decadence, already with a taste for violent larceny, they fall easily into Alien’s world of Scarface-inspired gang-banging and armed robbery.

Spring Breakers is propelled more forcefully forward by its criminal plotline and sex-appeal setting than Korine’s previous films, but the auteur still feels fully in control of his message. We spend some time on campus, roaming aimlessly from flat, florescent dorm hallways to a dark college classroom where bored, antsy students twiddle their texting thumbs while an earnest professor drones on about Reconstruction and the effect of World War II on the Civil Rights movement.

Soon after, the robbery is staged from a detached viewpoint that makes the girls’ aggro threats of violence all the more unnerving; as their practiced mean-girl poses flips easily into more bruising, dangerous threats, we’re not sure to what extent they’re mimicking Tarantino movies they’ve seen, riding out the ultimate sorority-girl power trip, or simply tapping into the primal, bullying anger within. Probably all three.

Once they get to St. Pete, the spring break getaway drifts by as even more of a dreamland; a sophistic spiritual journey, painted by Korine with a smutty, minimalistic impressionism. “I just want to freeze life forever” and “This is who I’m supposed to be,” the ladies babble as they soak in existential amorality—right up until their arrest plunges such idyllic delusion into a whining, narcissistic self-pity that leaves most of them easy pickings for Alien’s spacey, self-actualized patter.

Franco is flat-out terrific. Sporting tear-drop tats and a silver grill, his perpetually stoned grin sways and slides from smug swagger to momentary doubts, back to blissfully boasting “Look at all my shit!” and repeating his goofy mantra, “Spring Break forever, bitches!” until it starts to feel oddly profound.

Such posturing makes it easy to giggle at Alien (and Franco), but the character is not a sly wink, a la Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused. The (yes, somewhat film-hipsterish) audience I saw Spring Breakers with giggled at Alien because with Franco on the screen they assumed he was playing it as a joke. But he’s not, and had it been an unknown in the role, the wigga gangster wouldn’t have been funny at all—when you look past the star to the performance, Alien careens between genuinely sleazy-scary and desperate and sad.

Though it slip-slides along quickly, Spring Breakers feels heavy and distorted in the best, most mesmerizing manner; its hazy narrative propelled by its characters’ single-minded apathy. Thrumming along to Skillex’ throbbing electronic bass on the soundtrack, Korine wiggles past bikini girls in handcuffs and—later—pink ski masks, toward something wicked, sweat-soaked and rotting in the sun. (The film’s second half hums with the tension of a shoe—or beach flip-flop—ready to drop. The filmmaker’s slacker nihilism hides both a vicious cynicism and a bruised dreamer’s romanticism, and he’s happy to let satire, irony, and sincerity collide, and swirl without drawing handy lines around the churn.

All of this could play as lurid and shallow as spring break itself—a hazy collage of slo-mo butts and boobs, booze and boinking, of blow pops and bullets, served up for cheap voyeurism disguised as ironic subversion.

But what I ended up appreciating about Spring Breakers was that it drew me in and held my fascination throughout, while leaving me in the end not quite sure how I felt about it all as dirty, messy, confounding art.

Thematically and stylistically the film shimmers at the edge of your vision, as seductive as fish scales in the midday sun. Is it an art film pretending to be hedonistic exploitation or hedonistic exploitation posing as an art film. I know it’s probably representative of a whole different kind of shallow on my part, but I’ve always found that sort of artistic ambiguity fascinating, even appealing. I like a film that makes me wonder if I’m getting the point or just being had. I would not be a bit surprised if six months or a year from now, on a second viewing, I find Spring Breakers to be deplorable garbage posing as esoteric satire, but for now, on a first viewing, I was hooked.