Director : Danny Leiner Starring : John Cho, Kal Penn

Cheerfully stupid where it counts but smarter than Danny Leiner's previous movie, Dude, Where's My Car?, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle does have a few serious notions bopping around its head, but mostly it's just a frenetic free-for-all that riotously, raunchily succeeds even when it's at its grossest. And that's probably what will be your barometer for digestion of this movie: can you handle a pustule-busting backwoods Jesus freak? A blood-squirting emergency-room operation? Two comely lasses engaging in a game of "Battleshits"? And most frighteningly, a horny Doogie Howser humping a car seat and moaning about "love stains"? If so, do I have a movie for you!

Out of context, Harold and Kumar's excellent adventures sounds disgusting and stupid, but string them all together and you have a comedy that moves unlike most any other this year. With nonstop energy and a breakneck pace, Harold and Kumar takes a simple premise – two stoned dudes, jonesing for White Castle burgers, set out to satiate their desire – and strings it out into one wild ride. Impressively chock-filled with quotable one-liners and a host of 21st century cameos, Harold and Kumar never wears out its welcome and plays like the best skits of the past three – no, make that five – years of Saturday Night Live edited end-to-end. Unlike Dude, where stupidity seemed its own reward, Harold and Kumar actually seems to want to tell a story and get you invested in its characters. Harold (John Cho) is the doormat Wall Street analyst who gets others' work dumped on him and harbors a secret crush on hottie Maria; Kumar (Kal Penn) is putting off med school by blowing each and every admissions interview despite his obvious smarts. Their quest is for more than White Castle burgers – it's about finding who they are. What they want to be! Where they want to go! It's about life, man!

Okay, that might be stretching it, but seriously, there's a lot more going on here than just a stoner comedy, and that's what makes it memorable and worthy of the cult status it deserves to attain. Leiner and screenwriters John Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg take lighthearted yet potent shots at race relations in the US, and give us character arcs to follow in addition to the dopey side trips with stoned cheetahs and Wilson Philips songs (the sequence set to "Hold On" ranks as one of the funniest things I've seen in years). The huge cast whips through the movie with barely a hello-and-goodbye, though Neil Patrick Harris, playing a frighteningly tumescent version of himself, deserves to be singled out for nothing if not sheer bravery. It's ultimately left up to Cho and Penn to anchor the movie; their buddy team is a stereotypical melding of repressed and carefree, but they bring an enthusiasm to it that knocks down any of the clichéd dynamics. The only thing that may give you pause are the innumerable – and I mean, innumerable – gay panic jokes that pop up every five minutes or so. It's so excessive at times that you want to tell Harold and Kumar to just make out and get it over with. Which they kind of do at one point, but…. best to leave that to be discovered.