“Hot Tub Time Machine” is the poignant story of three men, adrift in their 40s, who try to recapture the lost joys and squandered possibilities of their youth. I’m not entirely joking, though the movie itself is a nonstop barrage — somewhere between a riot and an orgy — of crude, obnoxious gags and riffs. If you are a connoisseur of sexual, scatological or just plain stupid humor, you will find your appetite satisfied, even glutted. But viewers of a certain age and background — let’s say those who know the lyrics to “Jesse’s Girl” by heart, even if they never really liked that song — are likely to endure the merry anarchy with a twinge of pained, slightly nauseated nostalgia.

Nick, Lou and Adam, whom we first meet in the throes of early middle age, are still haunted by memories of the 1980s, when they were young and dumb and full of potential. Here in the weary present, Adam (John Cusack) has just been dumped by his live-in girlfriend, and you have the feeling that this kind of thing has happened to him many times before.

Nick (Craig Robinson) has a stable if not quite happy marriage, but his job in a dog-grooming salon provides regular, humiliating reminders of the musical career he might have had. And Lou (a frighteningly manic Rob Corddry) is an alcoholic, divorced, wildly self-destructive train wreck of a man. But the movie doesn’t really ask you to pity these guys; they feel sorry enough for themselves already, and their misery seems well earned in any case.

The three pals, joined by Adam’s doughy 20-year-old nephew, Jacob (Clark Duke, looking like a younger, less smug version of the Apple scapegoat and ersatz know-it-all John Hodgman), light out for a ski resort that was once the scene of some vaguely recollected, endlessly mythologized youthful debauchery. They find the place a dilapidated shell of its former glory, but a night in a hot tub — which is exactly what the movie’s title says it is — transports them back to 1986, when the place was buzzing with bad haircuts, garish clothes and enough winking pop culture references to furnish a weeklong Trivial Pursuit tournament. Hey, isn’t that Chevy Chase? It is!