Hipster loathing has graduated from passive distaste to aggressive protest. The religion of rebellion, of conformity to anti-conformity, seems to every generation looking back on their bygone years in the fold to be at a fever pitch.  As naive and as stylistically and ideologically clichéd as each iteration of youth culture is, it was never your generation who erected the shrine to meaningless aesthetics.  Your generation stood for something.  Yeah, right.

So goes a heap of criticism hurled at Edgar Wright’s hipster-drenched comic book adaptation, “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.”  Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera), a mousy, disinterested, sarcastic early twenty-something hipster, is the bassist for the self-aware and self-proclaimed awful garage band, Sex Bob-omb.  He represents the shifting romantic zeitgeist from macho, leather jacket-wearing, beer can-crushing types to sensitive, artistic, pseudo-intellectuals who know a thing or two about fashion — or at least live close enough to an American Apparel to keep up with the latest indie trends.

Cera, who would’ve been laughed at as a romantic lead as recently as a decade ago, plays something of a heartthrob.  There is scarcely a shoe-gazing damsel in his extended social network who hasn’t felt the power of Scott Pilgrim’s irresistible dry wit and boyish charm.  After his most recent breakup he’s even resorted to tapping the high school dating pool, hooking up with a hopelessly naive 17-year-old, Knives, who worships the ground he walks on.  This type of devotion from a too-young rebound girlfriend is a bore.  It takes the withdrawn gaze of Ramona Flowers, the new kid in town and possibly the coolest girl in the world, to get Pilgrim’s amorous juices flowing.  But before these two can commence their too-cool-for-school courtship, Scott must fight and defeat Ramona’s seven evil exes in fantastical, video game-style mortal combat.

Why?  A symbology detailing the seemingly insurmountable obstacles facing modern, post-sexual revolution relationships seems to be the common interpretation of these well-choreographed, often hilarious battles.  That may very well have been the intention, but I think the film is a helluva lot more fun without the psycho-analytical subtext.  Whether these prolonged fights to the death are meant to be going on in Pilgrim’s mind or in the new reality of the video game age is irrelevant, as far I’m concerned.  They’re funny.  Very funny.

“Scott Pilgrim” may just be the movie to convert Michael Cera skeptics.  The 22-year-old actor is despised by some for his over-reliance on blank stares and barely audible mumbles.  His loose association with indie culture enrages others.  But his performance here, while not as wildly different from his previous roles, a la Daniel Day-Lewis, is still recognizably a unique and separate characterization.  Compared to roles like he had in “Juno” Michael Cera has grown leaps and bounds as an actor.

Ubiquitous video game references, including music directly from popular titles, 8-bit sight gags, villains transforming into coins upon defeat and even the use of an extra life when the going gets a little too tough, would have normally annoyed this critic to no end.  When Uwe Boll cut away to actual video game screen shots in “House of the Dead” (2003), giving up on film altogether didn’t seem like such a bad option.  But the way Wright unabashedly, skillfully and quite sincerely incorporates the general culture of gaming and comics into film just works.  It’s exciting, funny — even graceful.

No, today’s youth culture doesn’t stand fast and defiant for any particular cause, but is that such a bad thing?