National Lampoon is re-entering the feature business with National Lampoon’s Hollywood Hustle, a self-referential comedy that leans hard into the industry’s love affair with its own dysfunction — and its cast’s own well-documented, headline-grabbing scandals.

The film boasts a deliberately chaotic ensemble led by Nick Cannon, Alec Baldwin and Mickey Rourke — who made recent headlines over a chaotic GoFundMe drive — with a supporting cast that includes Tara Reid, Danny Trejo, Til Schweiger, Carrot Top and Patrick Warburton.

Whether audiences view Hollywood Hustle as affectionate ribbing or as a darker snapshot of an industry that eats its own may hinge on how they read performances like Rourke’s. In a movie about bank accounts vanishing overnight and careers teetering on the brink, the actor’s very real eviction saga lends the satire an edge that even National Lampoon could not have scripted.

The project marks the feature directorial debut of Mike Hatton, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Paul Sloan, and stars as a harried independent producer. Cannon plays a Hollywood power agent scrambling to land Baldwin as the marquee name for a collapsing production.

When the film’s bank account is suddenly drained by a mysterious thief, Hatton’s producer character and Sloan’s washed-up movie-star sidekick are forced into a desperate race across Los Angeles to save their movie before time, creditors and assorted criminals catch up with them.

Set in a “meta” version of Hollywood, Baldwin, Rourke, Reid, Trejo and Carrot Top all portray exaggerated, fictionalized versions of themselves, blurring the line between satire and confession.

The production leaned into that inside-baseball tone, staging scenes in real L.A. locations with additional units shooting in Las Vegas and Majorca, Spain. The score comes from an unexpected source: System of a Down frontman Serj Tankian, whose Grammy-winning background adds a rock-opera edge to the madcap narrative.

For Rourke, the timing of the film is especially on the nose. The 73-year-old actor, once one of Hollywood’s most magnetic leading men, was recently evicted from his home of a decade.

After his manager launched a GoFundMe in his name, he recorded an emotional social media post denying any knowledge of the “humiliating” fundraiser and pledging to return every penny of the $100,000 raised by concerned fans. He is , while friends quietly tried to assist behind the scenes.