Though its meta-heavy plot gets tiresome after a while, Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is a successful return to form for Kevin Smith. Though it’s a bit rough around the edges, all involved clearly came to have fun and that infectious energy is palpable for the entire runtime. It may be his raunchiest film in years, but it’s also his most emotionally intelligent.

Smith has every right to be older and wiser here, and Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, with its gentle anarchy and not-quite-mock nostalgia, is a time-machine sequel that passes the time amiably enough. But if Jay and Silent Bob get any older or wiser than this, they’re going to stop being who they are.

While Kevin Smith may never appear on a list of great filmmakers, his movies do understand something essential about getting older and growing up. Sometimes, we all just need to go back to the well.

For all its redundancies—the film enjoys telling us its definitions of sequel, remake, and reboot while also highlighting the myriad ways it knowingly embodies each—this authentic character growth is wholly new.

A satire of sequels, remakes, and (of course) reboots that always happens to be all three of those things, Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is both a flippant look at how the nerd industry is eating itself alive, and a more sincere — if still very stupid — tale about making room for the next generation.