“All I want is someone to tell me what is good and what is bad.”

That line serves as a sort of thematic climax for The Informers, and ensemble movie starring a series of rich, vapid, drug-addled, narcissistic interrelated characters. (As that sentence might imply, it’s based on a book by Bret Easton Ellis.)

The line is spoken by the college-age Graham (Jon Foster), the closest thing the movie has to a protagonist. But what is the movie trying to say with it? Is it an indictment against Graham’s parents, the abhorrent adulterer William (Billy Bob Thornton) and the drug-addled Laura (Kim Basinger)? Or is it just a statement that among early-’80s rich people living in Los Angeles, no morality exists?

That seems to be closer to the truth, which makes the movie’s message a little trite: rich people are bad, and rich people on drugs are especially bad. Indeed, the only “good deed” that occurs in the entire movie is done by a poor hotel clerk who looks like he’s in a constant state of withdrawal.

The clerk is played by Brad Renfro, in his final role before the actor died of a heroine overdose on January 15th, 2008. It might be the best role in the movie, in the sense that it subverts the standard expectations about weak and easily-influenced characters.

Other than Renfro’s plotline (which also features an appearance by Mickey Rourke in the type of role Rourke was habitually getting before The Wrestler came out), the movie focuses entirely on the rich, jumping between Graham’s storyline, his parents’, and a rock star’s, the latter of whom is so deep into a drug haze that he might as well be a vegetable. As his plane flies into L.A., he looks up at his manager and tentatively, like a fourth grader reluctant to ask his teacher a question, says, “I used to live here, didn’t I?”

His subsequent attempts at being a functional human being achieve a hypnotic quality (thanks largely to composer Christopher Young) but the plotline goes nowhere; the second-to-last time we see him, he does something we don’t understand, and then the next thing we know he’s boarding his plane again, and that’s it.

We also follow one of Graham’s friends Tim (Lou Taylor Pucci), who seems like a decent enough kid but is trapped with atrocious parents. His father takes him to Hawaii, and things go badly, but in the scheme of things, not that badly — it basically ends the same way it begins.

As for Graham, he’s in love with his girlfriend — a perpetually topless Amber Heard — even though she’s sleeping with everybody in town (often with Graham joining in). She also seems to have come down with a mysterious sickness, which no one