We meet our protagonist when he’s just a young nobody with big dreams. Then he gets his shot at stardom and runs with it until he’s on the top of the world. Tragedy strikes as our hero gets too big for his breeches and plummets on a self-propelled spiral down into rock bottom. Finally, he recoups and we end our story just as the protagonist gets back on track to fame and fortune.

Does that sound familiar? It should, since you’ve seen that formula applied to pretty much every profession under the sun (particularly sports) in so many thousands of movies. But now apply it to pornography circa 1977. That’s Boogie Nights.

This is the story of Eddie Adams, aka Dirk Diggler, played by Mark Wahlberg. He’s a high school droupout who works as a waiter at an LA nightclub while moonlighting as a male prostitute. After being miraculously discovered by a big-shot porn director named Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds), Dirk rockets to porno superfame, powered by endless stamina and an improbably huge penis. We also meet Amber Waves (Julianne Moore), a slightly older porn star who takes him in as a surrogate mother. There’s Reed Rothchild (John C. Reilly), a porn actor/aspiring magician who fills the best friend role. Heather Graham plays an adorably sweet young actress only known as Rollergirl. Luiz Guzman plays the owner of the aforementioned nightclub, a Latino who’s desperate to get into the porno biz. We’ve also got Buck Swope (Don Cheadle), Little Bill (William H. Macy), Scotty (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the list of colorful characters and talented actors goes on and on.

The first half of this movie was a lot of fun. I’ll grant that it didn’t have quite as much sex or nudity as might be expected of a movie about the porn industry (sorry, I’m just a guy), but it was still a lighthearted spin on an old formula, centered around an endearingly naive and eager performance from Wahlberg. In fact, these characters were all perfectly cast and I genuinely liked getting to know them and their little quirks. The only one that annoyed me to any degree was Scotty (the whole “desperate gay unrequited crush” thing put me off a touch), though he was still well within tolerance.

But then came the New Year’s Eve party of 1979. This is where the film quite visibly took a turn for the worse. I know that the formula needs a point where the characters’ egos get too big and they go on a downward spiral, but the second half of this film hit a level of depressing that I haven’t seen since Requiem for a Dream (which wasn’t released until three years later!). There’s drug addiction, there’s drug deals gone bad, prostitution, bankruptcy, suicide, homicide — shit, this film has three people simultaneously shooting each other dead! Even Requiem never went that far.

There’s no way around it: The second hour of this film was not at all easy for me to watch. I mean, at least Requiem depicted horrible scenarios as a means of contemplating happiness. This film put our characters through the wringer for no greater purpose than to serve a formulaic plot. Still, it got a happy ending and our characters turned out better for the wear, so… yay?

I don’t think I could have made it through this film if it wasn’t for the cast. The actors were all amazing and they did a lot to make their characters sympathetic. What’s more, the film ended in such a way that it established our (surviving) main characters as a strange little surrogate family, and that appealed to me very much (even despite the incestuous nature of this “family”).

Kudos are also due to the visuals. There were a few camera stunts and editing tricks that didn’t work for me (the back half had scenes with some strange overlapping fades that just looked ugly), but the film also had a handful of long tracking shots that went for several minutes at a time and looked beautiful. The first shot of the movie went through a crowded nightclub for something like three and a half minutes without a visible cut and I can’t imagine how Anderson did that. Last but not least, the period setting is exquisite. This ’90s presentation of late ’70s LA not only feels authentic, but also vibrant and colorful enough to stay captivating throughout.

Alas, this movie’s ’70s imagery also comes with the dread ’70s pacing. The film clocks in at 155 minutes and it could easily have been much shorter. There are countless character beats throughout the film that could have been trimmed down or cut outright with no effect on the movie as a whole. I’ll grant that there’s some good drama and comedy to be found in those moments, but they still dragged the film down to a noticeable extent.

Boogie Nights is not a bad movie. It’s technically competent, very well-acted and I found the characters to be a lot of fun. Unfortunately, that second half is what keeps me from giving this a full recommendation. Watching this film go from enjoyable in its first hour to depressing in its second was like suddenly making a U-turn at 80 MPH. It’s a lot to handle and I can understand how it might turn people off the film entirely. But if you think you can deal with that and you feel so inclined, go ahead and give the film a try.