Gentlemen Broncos

"Gentlemen Broncos," the new film from writer/director Jared Hess, is a celebration of the immature and the amateur. That's the sunny spin. If you're past the age of worrying about detention, it's an endurance test. How many grotesques, morons and creeps can you watch twist in a barely moving narrative wind?

Hess takes the perspective of his 2004 breakout hit, "Napoleon Dynamite" -- dork gleefully ignores his own limitations to win the hearts of the general populace -- and flips it. Our dour-faced hero, Benjamin (Michael Angarano) exhibits some slightly nerdy behavior, but he's the only thing close to a normal-seeming person in the film. Because he's home schooled, he encounters no high school jocks or cheerleaders, just one far less charming version of Napoleon Dynamite after another. Hess' goal seems to be to surround Benjamin with so many aggravating, awful people who gleefully ignore their own limitations that eventually he'll snap.

Benjamin, whose father is dead, shares a geodesic dome with his mother, Judith (Jennifer Coolidge) in the grim town of Saltair. Judith herself is a cartoon, an innocent who wears clothing two sizes too small, sells overpriced plus-size nightgowns at the mall, and uses her son as a sort of dressmaker's dummy for her own atrocious fashion designs. She's kindly but clueless. In one scene, she brings home a "Golden Angel" big brother type from church, Dusty (Mike White) for Benjamin to bond with. Dusty shoots cats with air guns, carries a defecating python, lusts openly after Judith, and, like most of the residents of Saltair, makes the denizens of "Wayne's World" look like geniuses.

The movie begins as Judith is sending her only child off to an annual writer's camp for home-schooled kids, armed with a bag of unpeeled carrots and a giant popcorn ball (her specialty, and an unfunny joke Hess pushes on us for the entire movie) for lunch and apparently dinner and the mortifying send-off "I love you forever." She also gives him a little spending money, which he's promptly relieved of by a brassy, simpering horror named Tabatha (Halley Feiffer) who, like Benjamin, writes books. Tabatha's books are sexed-up mysteries, about "a ranch hand named Pierre," whereas Benjamin writes science fiction fantasies.

She's also a budding film producer, who works side by side with the local teenage auteur, Lonnie Donaho (Hector Jimenez, who was also in Hess' "Nacho Libre"). Jimenez is blessed with full lips, but he pushes out the lower one, turns it down and distorts his mouth into a shape that seems unachievable without the benefit of a few years with an African tribe's lip plate. Then he smiles. The results are hideous and uncommonly distracting. You stare at Jimenez thinking, where's the joke? Does Hess have a short-bus complex? Did he pull the wings off flies as a child? Is he still doing that, but with actors?

I'll leave that to his therapist and focus instead on his obvious and considerable interest in the concept of audacity vs. authenticity, which may be a natural offshoot of Hess' experiences as a young Mormon who found himself an overnight success in Hollywood after "Napoleon" fever swept the nation. Virtually everyone in "Gentlemen Broncos" is an audacious and immodest huckster, except for Benjamin. Lonnie has made 83 films, Tabatha boasts, although Lonnie clarifies that "some of them are just trailers." Tabatha fancies herself an author, actress and agent, all of them extraordinaire. The keynote speaker at the writing camp is Benjamin's hero, the prolific science fiction writer Dr. Ronald Chevalier (Jemaine Clement), who oozes pomposity with every word and gesture. Clement, one half of the "Flight of the Conchords" band, sports a Bluetooth, '80s-style leather jackets and facial hair right out of Star Trek, and is actually spot on and very funny. But no film can coast on one smart send-up.

The big disappointment is in the authenticity department. Chevalier is creatively blocked, so he steals Benjamin's latest fantasy, "Bronco," a tale of a hirsute warrior who lives in a barren futuristic land where the villains run yeast factories. Well, that sounds offbeat in a bad way, but humble, shy and retiring Benjamin must be blessed with some creativity, right? He has to be more talented than Tabatha, Lonnie or Chevalier, because otherwise this would just be a movie about a bunch of lunatics and yahoos. But when the movie veers off into Benjamin's imagined cinematic version of "Bronco," with Sam Rockwell in the lead, we despair; it's the mundane ramblings of an untalented child. Even worse, we then have to endure an action version of Chevalier's plagiarized interpretation (he makes Bronco a pink-clad "tranny" instead) and finally Lonnie's filmed version of the original text. Three mini movies within the umbrella of one movie, all of them utter torture to watch. "Napoleon Dynamite" may have wowed audiences everywhere, but "Gentlemen Broncos" leaves the impression that its Emperor has no clothes.

Mary Pols is a Bay Area-based journalist. She reviews movies for Time.com and was for many years a film critic for the San Jose Mercury News, Oakland Tribune and Contra Costa Times. She is also the author of a memoir, "Accidentally on Purpose," published in 2008 by Ecco/ Harper Collins. When she's inspired, usually by something weird, she blogs about it at www.maryfpols.com.