Perhaps the most ironic thing about satire, a genre that is already well steeped in irony, is that it is best appreciated by the same culture it lambastes. Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, a literary satire of small town life, was hugely successful in precisely the rural communities it deprecated. This generation’s most far-reaching satire, The Simpsons, is insanely popular with the American families it mocks. Likewise, Kick-Ass will be most appreciated, and most enjoyed, by the comic book culture it satirizes. Perhaps this is because good satire has an insider understanding of the community it questions; it forgives their foolish excesses by making their faults into jokes. Many critics have complained that Kick-Ass treats comic book violence with humor; they complain about the unnatural dichotomy between reality and fantasy; they complain that the heroes are “morally reprehensible.” Have they never seen a superhero movie before? Have they never read a comic book? Or have they simply never enjoyed one? Because Kick-Ass was made for those who are not merely familiar with the hyper-reality of superhero comics, but for those who are obsessed with it.

Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) is an average high school student living in New York City. His obsession with comic book superheroes brings him to ask why, in a world in such need of one, why has nobody ever tried to become a superhero? His fanboy friends dismiss his question, stating that without powers, a person would have to be crazy to become a costumed hero. They’d wind up dead. But Dave has nothing to lose: he orders a green wetsuit off the Internet, and dubs himself Kick-Ass.

How does one prepare to become a superhero? Well, if you’ve watched Spider-Man enough times, you know that you must talk to yourself in costume in front of your mirror, you must practice jumping from buildings, and you must fight crime. Dave creates a MySpace profile for Kick-Ass, offering his services, but it isn’t until he first spies some hooligans trying to break into a car that he gets his first chance at fighting crime. “As every serial killer already knows,” he tells us, “soon fantasizing is not enough.”

His early fights gain the attention of a twisted father and daughter duo, Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and Hit-Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz), and it isn’t long before they confront Kick-Ass in person. We meet Hit-Girl, a foul-mouthed eleven-year-old girl with a bright purple wig, as she tears into – literally – a roomful of gangsters. Her entrance is electrifying and shocking and utterly brilliant. We soon learn that Big Daddy and Hit Girl have an arch nemesis, crime boss Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong), and want Kick-Ass to help them bring him down.

Dave is equally impressed and flabbergasted by Big Daddy and Hit-Girl – they’re the real deal, the epitome of what he had intended to become. But they’re also violent, and possibly insane. Should Dave back down, or should he move up to their level – even if it means becoming a killing m achine?

The dialogue of Kick-Ass is hip, smart, and unapologetically honest. Even the throw-away characters get memorable quips. But this isn’t Juno – it’s more like a cross between Superbad and a Todd Solondz film. The only major script problem is the introduction and implementation of Red Mist (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), another wannabe superhero who simply doesn’t match the likeability of Kick-Ass or the extremity of Hit-Girl and Big Daddy. His scenes don’t ruin the film, but they do hurt it – Kick-Ass goes from a great film to simply a good one. If his scenes were better handled (or excluded), Kick-Ass would be a front contender for not only one of the best comedies o f the past decades, but one of the best superhero films as well.

Kick-Ass may be the main character, but Hit-Girl is who everyone will be talking about. This is not to say Dave/Kick-Ass isn’t well-developed and likeable – because he is – he’s just not nearly as scene-stealing as Hit-Girl. Both as an idea and as a character, Hit-Girl is destined to gain a cult following. As an eleven-year-old assassin, she is a cross between the flamboyant Robin of the 1960s “Batman,” Natalie Portman’s Mathilda in Leon the Professional, and Uma Thurman’s Bride in Kill Bill. She’s peppy, curses like a sailor, and smiles with childish glee as she stabs a grown man in the heart. Yet at the same time, because she’s so young, she’s vulnerable – like a cool little sister that you both admire and feel the need to protect. Chloë Grace Moretz gives an adult, career-defining performance that can accurately be compared to Jodie Foster’s breakthrough role as a teenage prostitute in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. Both her performance and character are among the best of the year.

Aaron Johnson as Dave/Kick-Ass is also strong, not playing into the Michael Cera school of teenage awkwardness, and instilling his character with a naïve idealism that lets the audience relate to him, rather than view him as completely insane. Another actor could easily have played Kick-Ass as out there as Don Quixote, but Joh nson keeps him grounded in a recognizable teenage world.

Nicolas Cage continues to build his cult status with Big Daddy, donning an Adam West enunciation and delivering with that pitch-perfect deranged quality that smart directors use to their advantage, and dumb directors try to mold into something Cage is not. (Compare his gleeful insanity in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans to his cringe-worthy “regular-guy” in Knowing.)

The only weak characters in Kick-Ass are the villains. Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong) gets a few laughs, but his character is bland. It’s a rule of superhero movies that their success is largely dependent on the strength of the villain. Kick-Ass has outlandish heroes, but they have no one worthy to fight. You’d think that if there were people willing to become comic book heroes, at least someone would want to be a super villain. But Kick-Ass doesn’t explore that option.

Throughout Kick-Ass we’re treated to a super glossy, tri-chromatic that is reminiscent of both comic book art and flashy superhero movies. The framing of most shots looks like the framing of a graphic novel, and this works to set Kick-Ass within a hyper-real environment that makes violent sequences not only acceptable, but guilty pleasures. The style of the cinematography is less like a superhero film than other graphic novel satires brought to the screen, like Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World.

One of the key elements of Kick-Ass is the music selection. It’s one thing to have a masked eleven-year-old girl pummel a roomful of hired thugs; it’s another to have her doing it set to The Hit Girls’ “Bad Reputation.” Director Matthew Vaughn changes music selections sometimes within the middle of a scene, setting the tone per beat and letting you know sometimes it’s okay to laugh at the ridiculousness of a little girl causing bloody mayhem. He even edits sequences to the beat of the songs, pushing further the cartoonish humor of the image of a small girl being so incredibly brutal. Vaughn also mimics not only Tarantinian violence, but his propensity to use existing music to score his film. Kick-Ass features tracks from 28 Days Later, Sunshine, and several other modern films. This may have less to do with homage than a low-budget, but the music (present over almost every single moment of the film) helps to articulate the tone of Kick-Ass, and it definitely lets you laugh at things that might otherwise be off-putting.

With Layer Cake, Stardust, and now Kick-Ass, Matthew Vaughn has shown himself to be a director whose primary strength is subverting genre expectations. It’s the voice of the filmmaking of Kick-Ass that sets it apart from other, lesser superhero comedies – it feels smart, edgy, and cool, even at moments when it’s none of those things. Within the film, the main spectacle is seeing Hit-Girl in action. I don’t think youth has been this cheerfully violent since A Clockwork Orange. The excess of the violence is completely necessary – it’s that counterbalance of gruesome violence with Hit-Girl’s innocent smile that make the scenes pop.