In what might as well be the official film of Y2K, David Fincher's Fight Club grabs audiences by the balls (women and sufferers of testicular cancer included) and whips them through a hasty introductory course to the real apocalypse: an underground revolution led by all the world's disgruntled workaday office drones.

There's something utterly absurd about fretting over a glitch in some binary end-of-the-millenium rollover, especially when you consider the power unleashed if all the Windows-dependent consumer groupies were to finally unhook their Starbucks IVs, pay off their Blockbuster Video late fees and decide to reclaim their lost identities.

Like a lost chapter in The Anarchist Cookbook, David Palahniuk's volatile novel unleashes all that pent-up aggression suppressed by decades of living under the "Buy! Buy! Buy!" capitalist mentality. As for Fight Club the film, the recipe calls for two parts testosterone to one part adrenaline (ingredients Fincher generously shared in his earlier films, Alien 3, Se7en and The Game). The result: a precise homemade grenade that detonates in your lap, in your mind, in your subconscious.

For something under two and a half hours, David Fincher rips his audiences from the comfort of their neatly ordered lives. For those same two and a half hours, a million neatly ordered little homes stand empty and unguarded, the flickering of unwatched TV infomercials illuminating the precious dens we've constructed for ourselves.

"Shouldn't someone be guarding the furniture?" you wonder absently as your house folds in on itself in a blazing fireball. At least, that's how things go for Fight Club's narrator, a generic nobody whose name doesn't even seem to matter enough for the film to share it with us. Even a Social Security number tattooed across this guy's forehead would give his identity more credit than it deserves.

Here is a man whose only cathartic release comes from cruising self-help support groups. No-Name lives the husk of a life, plastering on a different name tag every night of the week and vampirizing the pain of frail skeletons all but eaten by disease, men who have lost their balls to cancer, etc. In this wicked milieu, No-Name meets another "tourist," a fellow faker named Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), who looks like the long-lost urchin produced if a street tramp had made it with Elvira. Marla poses a threat even in this sphere. She can give away the secret that he suffers from none of these disorders, forcing him back into his routine existenceŠ

That is, until a life-changing demi-coincidence jars him from his insomniac stupor. Returning from yet another of his destinationless business trips, No-Name meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a loud-dressing young soap salesman whose suave detachment strikes something between macho admiration and a homoerotic spark in our narrator.

Durden embodies everything No-Name doesn't find in himself. Durden's a slick ladies' man, aloof and removed from everything that shackles No-Name to the day-to-day cycle of a carbon-copy existence. At one job, Durden splices X-rated frames from porno flicks into G-rated family fare; at another, he "sweetens" the soup du jour with a contribution of his own. Up against a personality as magnetically counter-institutional as Tyler Durden, No-Name's not quite sure whether he wants to f*** him or pound the hell out of him.

Of course, with the catalog contents of his life blown from their high-rise niche out onto the street below, No-Name doesn't have much choice. He molts the smoldering shell of his non-existence and hooks up with Durden, moving into Durden's septic tank dwelling place and starting a new breed of self-help group: Fight Club.

Beginning as a parking lot free-for-all, Fight Club grows quickly. It seems the woodwork was teeming with violence-suppressed males looking for an outlet to vent their frustration, men who turn out in droves for the chance to pound one another senseless. As Fight Club grows, Durden makes the rules stricter, moving his eager partners in pummeling to a dank basement where they can practice their masochistic rage without interruption.

For men whose only exercise comes from the shuffle between their cubicles and the coffee pot, men whose tender hides glow milky from the anti-tan of fluorescent-lighting workplaces, the cold drudgery of existence thaws with every bloody fist they take to the face, every blow to the gut they give another needy participant. But Tyler Durden envisions something much greater, transforming Fight Club into a small army bent on regimented anarchy.

Rather than helping old ladies across the street, Durden's band of anti-Boy Scouts retaliate against the forces of corporation and social order. In Fight Club, a familiarly maniacal Brad Pitt finally gets the chance to wreak the mayhem everyone feared from the Army of the 12 Monkeys in Terry Gilliam's superficially similar film. The Fight Club pranks strike back at the structure that emasculates them, sometimes comical, usually sick, and always destructive in a creative way, should such a thing be imaginable.

Fincher reaches the apex of his IKEA-hating, Starbucks-smashing black humor groove here, as Fight Club's social revisionism grows in intensity (picture news coverage of the L.A. riots from the point of view of the looters). At the same time, Marla reenters the picture, complicating matters as Tyler Durden's goals darken. No-Name's curiosity (and ours) about Durden's mysterious agenda leads us to a reality-altering revelation so wild that it sends the final act of the film reeling downhill towards a conclusion rather than sustaining the film's intense upward climb.

Fight Club climaxes too soon, so to speak, with everything following its twist still in keeping with what we then understand to be an elaborately stylish expository segment. It's not so much that the end doesn't satisfy — the finale is too much if anything. It's just that the buildup is so juicy (perhaps "bloody raw" might be more appropriate) that a certain terror grips you when you realize that everything must end.

An open-ended version of Fight Club would have made a glorious franchise-starter or the pilot for a colorfully anti-network television series. The film plays with all the censor-slamming rebelliousness of a '90s A Clockwork Orange, pouring acid on the most sensitive wounds of our time. Despite the dangers such a film surely poses to impressionable young minds, it seems such a shame that this subversive setup must wrap up at all, no matter how brilliant or apocalyptic the ending might be. And what but a stroke of perverse brilliance can you call the close-up cock shot that flashes not quite subliminally on screen, perhaps a sign of Durden's film-splicing handiwork?

Fight Club is a stunning and volatile film, one with a frightening allure for the type of audiences you don't want picking up any "good ideas." As an excessive and fast-paced little destruction manual, Fight Club certainly won't work for everyone — somebody keep Bob Dole and Jerry Falwell tied up at home! But the movie will shake certain audiences enough that they won't be able to look at their mod living room furniture the same way again, and it will probably have those minimum-wage concession stand workers pissing in the popcorn butter. Don't say I didn't warn you.