“Bomb the System,” a new feature film by Adam Bhala Lough about a crew of graffiti writers, is a love letter to New York City. But while it’s set in the present, the New York City it romanticizes is the grittier, more freewheeling one of 20 years ago.

For the graffiti subculture, those were the halcyon days – a time when maverick writers tagged the subway system with (near) impunity and dreamed of “going all city” (getting their murals up on all the subway lines simultaneously).It was a time, before real estate brokers ruled the Lower East Side and Disney ruled Times Square, during which the sight of whole car “burns” symbolized (depending upon your perspective) either the freedom or lawlessness of New York City. To the young writers who painted them, it was a bid for fame, however fleeting.

“Bomb the System” is superficially about three graffiti writers who carry on that tradition in the more sanitized environs of today’s New York. Their ambitions are the same as their forebears.’ “Hate I can deal with, anonymity I can’t,” says one. But the real subject of the film is the graffiti subculture itself. “Bomb the System” is an homage, companion, and update to “Style Wars,” Tony Silver’s classic documentary about early 1980s graffiti culture. It takes the same care to explain the intricate unwritten laws and subtle mores of the culture.

This is something of a trend of late. “Lords of Dogtown,” which comes out next week, is a feature film version of the award-winning 2002 documentary “Dogtown and Z-Boys.” Both deal with the same group of Venice, Calif., skateboarders who revolutionized the sport in the early 1970s. Along with “Lords of Dogtown,” “Bomb the System” carves out a style of anthropological fiction in which characters and plot are subservient to the culture and times. They’re not biopics, but anthro-pics.

Without the benefit of a narrator, this can make for clunky storytelling. Our guide through the byways of the graffiti subculture is Blest (Mark Webber), a Beck look-alike graffiti writer with vague aspirations to the art world. In him, the film’s theme of inheritance is made literal. An early flashback shows his older brother, a renowned graffiti writer in the 1980s, solemnly passing down his fat-tip markers on the eve of a fatal graffiti bombing run. Blest’s partners are Buk50 (Gano Grills), a streetwise black graffiti writer and his younger brother Lune (Jade Yorker), who play out their own version of the sibling-hero-worship story line.

To a tripping, original score by Def Jux founder El-P, Blest and crew daze-trip through the multi-culti graffiti underground. Nobody works here, except for the occasional stint of community service for graffiti-related crimes. But then, they don’t seem to need to: they shoplift their spray cans, crash in friends’ million-dollar SoHo lofts, and toke off the spliffs forever being passed their way. This represents the most significant break with graffiti’s past: The writers are no longer sons of the projects, but sons and daughters of privilege.

The camera takes an almost pornographic interest in the subtle signifiers of the culture: the wall art, fourth-finger rings, and stomach tattoos. Everywhere they go, someone seems to be popping and locking in the background, and after a while it begins to look like a photo issue of the Fader magazine.

Jittery, Aranofsky-like camera work and mildewy hues give the film a dreamy quality, but it tips into bong-hit magical realism when Blest visits a drug dealing mystic who operates out of the belly of a rusted ship moored along the West Side Highway. The Kabbalahbead crowd has nothing on them.

The dramas that propel the story are mostly mundane: spats with rival crews, cat-and-mouse with the NYPD Vandal Squad. Everything seems a set up for illuminating speechifying. A corn-rowed love interest named Alexandra (Jaclyn DeSantis) – herself part of an all-female crew that posters and stencils anti-commercial propaganda around the city – raises such heady themes as anarchy vs. activism, ambition vs. love, and bros vs. bitches. She makes a heroic effort to seem natural, despite being burdened with Lucas-worthy stilted explication. “I’m sorry that I’m going off on a tangent here,” she says after one especially apropos-of-nothing speech.

Actual drama develops when LUNE, the baby of the crew, is nabbed by the Vandal Squad, and has a box cutter taken to his face by the drug-addled officer Bobby Cox (Al Sapienza) – apparently the only unhip person in New York. After a Rambo-like sequence in which they gear up with fatcap aerosol cans, large-barrel paint markers, and pagers, Blest and company undertake a graffiti campaign to end all graffiti campaigns.

The film wisely teases its dark denouement with a series of choppy flashbacks, contributing a much needed sense of foreboding. The writing is on the wall, as it were, but like a graffiti tag, it isn’t always clear just what it spells out.