“Spring Breakers” evades good film criticism. It’s impossible to say whether it’s good or not, and it’s impossible to say anything smart about it. It’s the attention-whore of a movie that won the Internet, a meme-y, VICE-magazine-approved jumble of crazy casting choices, drugs, sex, violence, and self-aware artsiness. It’s so glaringly preposterous, and yet it makes room to respond to every critique anyone could bring up. It wants to have its cake, eat it, throw it up, have a threesome with it, and shoot it in the face. It’s one of the most entertaining movies to be released so far this year, and it seems engineered to make you feel embarrassed and uncomfortable about the baffled glee it instills.

If you haven’t seen the boobs-and-dubstep-filled trailers for “Spring Breakers” yet, you owe it to yourself to check them out. After you do, the question this review has to answer will not be “What’s this movie all about?” but rather “Is it really just this for 90 minutes?” And even that’s a tough one.

Watching “Spring Breakers” with any kind of objective or informed point of view is impossible because if you’re part of its intended audience, the stunt casting completely overwhelms whatever self-possessed value it might have. Disney princesses Vanessa Hudgens and Selena Gomez star as two of four college girls who rob a restaurant to pay for a trip to Florida over spring break. The other two girls, for what it’s worth, are Ashley Benson (of “Pretty Little Liars” fame) and Rachel Korine, director Harmony Korine’s wife. They drink and do a lot of drugs. Eventually, they meet up with a rapper and hustler named Alien (played by a cornrowed, gold-toothed James Franco), return to his gangstalicious crib, and beef with criminal extraordinaire Big Arch (played by rapper Gucci Mane) and his army of Miami thugs.

Everyone is wondering if “Spring Breakers” is as ridiculous and trashy as it looks. It is. The mystery, then, is how does something this obviously repugnant hold peoples’ attention in a feature-length context? The answer has something to do with director Harmony Korine. Since he wrote the screenplay for “Kids” in 1995, another movie about children being very bad, he’s made a bunch of uncomfortable, no-budget indie films that have racked him up some serious cred with the “alternative” crowd. When you’re watching a movie he’s directed, you know you’re watching “art,” or at least a bunch of people laughing in your face as they pretend to do “art” (which, as Das Racist taught us all, is also “art”).

“Spring Breakers” puts its gonzo porn in a grungy art movie context, which is a disarming gambit. I mean, what is this movie’s target audience? (“Fuck yeah, bro! Get juiced about irreverent montages set to mood-tones music! Improv-based acting styles are so frat! That narrative structure? Elliptical AS FUCK!”) But while Korine might encourage film buffs and college students to make pretentious claims about the film’s postmodern brilliance, he’s also fine with an evaluation of “That shit was crazy!”

Trying to figure out what “Spring Breakers” is going for is a shell game, one that’s made fun to play by kaleidoscopic shots and coked-up music video editing, but these artistic flourishes ultimately don’t matter. They don’t redeem the movie, they just make it a guilty pleasure instead of an immediate dismissal.

There is one aspect of “Spring Breakers” that makes the film worth seeing, however, and that’s James Franco’s performance. Hyped as an impersonation of the bonkers YouTube rapper RiFF RAFF, Franco’s Alien is actually a lot more layered. He has RiFF RAFF’s dead-eyed gangsterisms down pat, but as the film goes on and he becomes more attached to the four leads, we begin to feel the loneliness of his lifestyle and the childlike glee he takes in having someone to share it with. He transcends the film’s parodic hyperactivity to give us a character that’s genuinely haunting, and his twangy whispers of “spraang braayyk” will linger in your head long after the rest of the movie has evaporated.