Pothead Anna Faris finds herself on the lam after stealing the Communist Manifesto — seriously, that’s what’s happening here

At the heart of every good stoner movie is a quest. It doesn’t have to be anything particularly involved — as Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle proved, even a trip to the local mini-burger eatery can become an epic journey under the right circumstances. The formula is simple, though: take a charmingly listless character or two, give them what should be an easily attainable goal, add a reasonable amount of drugs and watch as the world fills with surreal, nigh-inexplicable obstacles.

Despite being based on a script that allegedly once bore the title “The Being John Malkovitch of Stoner Comedies,” director Gregg Araki’s Smiley Face does absolutely nothing to deviate from this formula. While this is not exactly a fault — laziness is what stoner comedies are all about, after all — it doesn’t make for an instant classic, either.

In Smiley Face’s case, the obligatory quest is slightly more ambiguous than Harold and Kumar’s burger run. Jane (Anna Faris) gets a bad case of the munchies and eats a batch of her roommate’s cupcakes, despite a strongly worded note urging her not to. This turns out to be a bigger mistake than she expects — the cupcakes are of the “special” variety, meaning not only does Jane have to figure out a way to replace them, she has to do so while baked beyond all reason.

Where some films delight in putting their stoned heroes in absurd situations, Smiley Face dwells largely in the real world. Traffic jams, dentists’ offices and amusement parks create their own unique challenges, and Faris’s Jane faces them all with the same perpetual bemusement. In fact, Faris is nearly perfect in the role, which seems to be written for her. Though she’s been cast in a lot of dreck (she stars in the Scary Movie series), her cameos in Lost in Translation and May showed a weirdly appealing, bubbly sort of energy that works well in the movie’s permafried state. If nothing else, Smiley Face shows that Faris can carry a movie on her own.

Well, not exactly on her own. Araki has stuffed his film with cameos. Sure, they’re not exactly A-listers, but with That 70s Show’s Danny Masterson, comedian Brian Posehn, The Office’s John Krasinski, character actor Danny Trejo and Carrot Top all making appearances, it’s hard not to get at least a few chuckles. Smiley Face delivers at least this much, and probably more if you’re in the same state as its protagonist, but it’s not quite enough to distinguish itself from the cinematic cannabis canon.

Audiences apparently agreed — in the film’s single-screen theatrical run, it brought in less than $10,000. The DVD doesn’t add much in the way of extra enticements, just a small making-of documentary, but Smiley Face is still the sort of flick that’s guaranteed to find a cult following on video.