The destructive takeover of a nice local business by a rapacious outsider has been a staple of American cinema for years, long, long before the onslaught of Globecom, Larry the Liquidator (“Other People’s Money”), and long, doubtless, before that dismaying crisis at George Bailey’s shambles of a building and loan (you know what movie I’m talking about). What makes this film worth watching are three performances.

There’s Dennis Quaid in the cliched, but still effective role of Dan Foreman, the veteran manager forced to compromise his principles to stay in a job that has become a penance, the reliably sinister Malcolm McDowell as “Teddy K,” the charismatic boss of Globecom, cheered and feared by the employees he will inevitably “let go,” and Topher Grace as the jargon-spouting young manager, in charge, but out of depth, brought in to boss Foreman around.

Like Peter Gibbons, the hero of “Office Space,” Mr. Grace’s character, Carter Duryea, comes to understand that he is an apparatchik trapped in a system in which he no longer believes. I don’t want to tell how the movie resolves his dilemma, but like Gibbons, and like Melville’s proto-slacker Bartleby before him, it becomes clear Duryea may simply decide that he prefers not to continue working for Teddy K or, for that matter, in any other office. He’s left with a choice: wicked big business or free-spirited “authenticity.”

I think you can guess what he decides to do.