After the Cannes Film Festival debut of Megalopolis—the estimated $120 million magnum opus that Francis Ford Coppola party financed with the profits from the sale of a portion of his wine empire—many critics slammed the film. At the same time, they insisted audiences see it regardless.

“Megalopolis Is a Problematic, Massive Flop,” a Dallas Observer headline reads, “You Might Just Love It Anyway.” GQ urged its readers: “Don’t look at the tweets, don’t look at Letterboxd, don’t look at Rotten Tomatoes—just go to a theater and see it for yourself.” In his review for Vanity Fair, Richard Lawson made no such plea, calling the movie “a passion project gone horribly wrong.” But he did wonder if some audiences might embrace Megalopolis on their own terms. “Maybe some of them will indeed see value in what Coppola has made,” he wrote. “Many more, though, will scratch their heads in utter disbelief.”

As Megalopolis enters its third week of release, the movie is an unmitigated bomb; it earned a mere $4 million in its opening weekend and a D+ on CinemaScore. It has, however, developed a nascent cult following on the internet, where users have been sharing their befuddled reactions to the 2-hour-18-minute epic, and referencing Adam Driver’s strangely hypnotic reading of the line, “Go back to the club.” Nobody seems to be loving the movie, but they aren’t indifferent to it either. Some audience members have logged repeat viewings on Letterboxd, amusingly compared the film’s visuals to a Linkin Park music video, or shared their thoughts on a Reddit thread about the film’s humor—which some think is unintentional, but others call deliberate.

The New Yorker’s Michael Schulman offered an eyewitness account of the phenomenon, writing, “Saw the 6:50 Megalopolis at Union Square. The (not paltry) crowd was cackling at the screen like it was Mommie Dearest or Showgirls. Cheered for ‘go back to the cluuub’ like it’s ‘No wire hangers!’ Credits are rolling and no one wants to leave. Do we have a new camp classic?”

The film has gone viral in part because its plot defies easy explanation. But if you want to know what actually happens in Megalopolis, here goes: Adam Driver plays Cesar Catilina, an architect in a retro-futuristic version of New York City called New Rome who wants to construct a utopia from Megalon, a radical material that he won a Nobel Prize for inventing. Cesar’s vision is met with opposition by New Rome’s by-the-book mayor, Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), a dynamic further complicated by Cesar’s romantic relationship with Cicero’s daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel). There are a ton of other bizarrely named characters doing things in the surrounding dreamscape, played by the likes of Shia LaBeouf, Laurence Fishburne, and Dustin Hoffman, among others. At one point, Jon Voight’s Hamilton Crassus asks another character, “What do you think of this boner I’ve got?” At another, Aubrey Plaza’s opportunistic TV personality (her name is Wow Platinum) says, “You’re anal as hell, Cesar,” before kneeling between his legs to add, “And I’m oral as hell.”

Surreal moments like these have become a selling point for many TikTok users, who have reveled in their uncomfortable Megalopolis viewing experiences, captured their before-and-after reactions to the movie, and even filmed a musical version of the film. That’s more than can be said for another recent flop, Joker: Folie à Deux, which managed to earn an even lower D CinemaScore. Coppola, at least, has tipped his hat to that film’s director, Todd Philips: “Ever since the wonderful The Hangover he’s always one step ahead of the audience never doing what they expect. Congratulations to Joker: Folie à Deux,” Coppola wrote on Instagram.

With theatrical release windows that have shrunk at the same rate as attention spans, filmmakers have to meet audiences where they’re at—even the New Hollywood masters like Coppola. Ahead of Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese enlisted his Gen Z daughter Francesca to help launch profiles for him on TikTok and Letterboxd. The strategy paid off: 46% of opening night moviegoers for Killers were under age 35, and the movie later earned 10 Oscar nominations. Megalopolis doesn’t have the industry support necessary for awards recognition, but its 85-year-old auteur is logging on anyway. The man behind Apocalypse Now and The Godfather recently invited the internet to ask him anything. In the spirited Q&A, Coppola shared his own Letterboxd and confirmed that, as his divisive movie suggests, he thinks about the Roman empire “quite a lot.”

While speaking with Rolling Stone earlier this year, Coppola said, “In a way, I have nothing left to lose anymore.” But perhaps there’s something to be gained from the audacious director’s first meme-age film.