Things Half-Remembered from 20 Years Ago

The other day The Topologist was watching a movie trailer for Atlas Shrugged. At first I thought that this was something that the Onion put together to mock the Tea Party, but apparently this is a real movie. As I have read the book (roughly 20 years ago) and The Topologist has not, he asked me for a plot summary. So I obliged:

So everyone is wandering around saying "Who is John Galt?" which is their culture's version of "WTF?" Everyone is unhappy because the United States is now like the stories we used to hear about Russia when we were in elementary school. And since everyone is wandering around feeling sorry for themselves, they can't build the high speed rail network that one of the main characters really, really, really wants to build. And then I think there is something about the Dread Pirate Roberts? No, wait, that was The Princess Bride. Maybe something about the United Nations? I forget. People alternate between speechifying at each other with Tea Party rhetoric and then having sex because everyone would stop reading if it was just the Tea Party stuff. Then the main characters decide because no one else wants to join their Tea Party, they will just take their balls and go home. They go out to the desert and build a perpetual motion machine that runs on static electricity. And then there is a really long section about the Tea Party (which I didn't read), and it ends with the main characters saying, "I told you so," and giving up on building the high speed rail system.