Remember 1968? Not the social upheaval or the war or the free love part, but the movie part?

Back in ’68, the Motion Picture Production Code (more popularly known as the Hays Code) was abandoned in favor of the present film rating system. For almost 40 years, the Hays Code had forbidden all sorts of moral turpitude—like married couples sharing a bed, nakedness, the consumption of alcohol, drug use and slandering either God or country.

Bad guys couldn’t win and good guys couldn’t utter much more than a “gosh darn.”

It was censorship heaven, and it made for some slick innuendo. My favorite? The final scene of Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest.” I shall say no more.

Back in ’68, freewheeling filmmakers suddenly found an entirely new creative outlet. Actors could curse like sailors, shed like snakes and, um, cuddle like bunnies. It was the birth of the American New Wave, of the antihero, of the gritty realist.

Over the next few years, renegade films like “Night of the Living Dead,” “Bonnie & Clyde,” “Midnight Cowboy,” “Easy Rider” and “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” would not only proliferate, but would prove box office manna to us once morally shackled (and apparently ethically confused) audiences.

I mention this because “The Men Who Stare at Goats” would have felt very comfortable back in 1968. More than once I was reminded of “Catch 22” or “M*A*S*H”—films about soldiers running amok—although this time, apparently, the insanity was sanctioned by the U.S. Army.

Ewan McGregor plays Bob Wilton, a small-time reporter who jaunts to Iraq to try to snatch a bigtime war story. Instead he meets Lyn Cassidy (George Clooney), a rather strange sort who admits to being part of the Army’s covert First Earth Battalion. Many years earlier, the Army had devised a secret unit in the hopes of employing paranormal powers against the enemy. And Cassidy, it seems, may still be at work. Or else just a tad insane. Wilton’s not sure.

Thus we’re tossed back and forth between Iraq (in 2002) and the First Earth Army’s training ground in the mid-’80s, watching this elite squadron of well-intentioned misfits (led by a trippy Jeff Bridges) attempt to engage their potent inner powers in the name of democracy.

“The Men Who Stare at Goats” is at times very funny (in a New Age, let’s-trip-back-to-thePeace-Generation sort of way), yet too much time lapses between those funny moments. The film feels as if it’s meant to inflict satire but stops a few blocks short of its ultimate destination—it feels too mellow, too holistic to poke maliciously at either the Army or our presence in Iraq.

It’s not an anti-war story in any sense but more an attempt at revelation (in much the same manner as “The Informant!”), gleaning much of its story—and unfortunately also many of its duller segments—from actual fact.

The film is based on a 2004 exposé written by Jon Ronson, a rather serious look at the apparent lunacy of the U.S. Army in exploring such far-fetched techniques as repeatedly exposing Iraqi prisoners to the “Barney & Friends” theme song. For the record, more than five minutes of “Barney” and I’d be spilling my guts. But that’s just me.

Turning any serious fact into a farce is an iffy proposition, and I expect “Goats” is the result of trying too hard to be funny when “funny” isn’t really all that present. It’s not a bad movie— entertaining enough for those of us who remember those lofty antiwar days when snickering at the establishment was hip. But sometimes, even bizarre truth is just far less interesting than fiction.