GENTLEMEN BRONCOS

I’m giving this film three slices for its consistency of vision, its seamless tone and the welcome presence of Jemaine Clement. But I still thought it was pretty stinky.

Directed and co-written by Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite), who penned the screenplay with his wife, Gentlemen Broncos is an uncomfortable, awkward and frequently unpleasant – both in terms of content and execution – comedy that tries so very very hard to squeeze more blood from the already over-tapped small-town weirdo stone. The story centers around nebbish Benji Purvis (Michael Angarano), a home-schooled teenager and aspiring fantasy-fiction writer whose hand-written space opus, “The Yeast Wars,” is stolen by famous but down-on-his-creative-luck author Ronald Chevalier (Clement), who’s desperate for an idea lest he be turfed by his publisher.

Simultaneously, Benji meets creepy teen Tabatha (Halley Feiffer), whose high-waisted mom jeans are rivaled in their inexplicability only by her oversexed, ADD-esque personality. Her best friend is Lonnie (Héctor Jiménez of Hess’s Nacho Libre), a would-be, no-budget indie-film producer with more than 80 ridiculously basic “productions” under his belt. The duo option Benji’s story for $100 and then promptly bastardize it, turning it into an embarrassing, unwatchable mess.

Speaking of...

I get that Jared Hess digs the quirk. I’ve seen his films, I understand that, frequently, his cast is made up entirely of the freaky and the unusual and the woeful amateurs delivering completely wooden line readings. Maybe he thinks it’s charming. Maybe he believes it’s funny and off-the-wall. But there is soooooooooo much of it in Gentlemen Broncos that it’s not only distracting, but it’s completely absurd and makes the movie a trial to watch.

Everything and everyone in this film looks strange and greasy and outdated and, for a while, I wasn’t even sure what time period it was set in – Tabatha mentions something about Benji posting his story online, so I assumed it was fairly close to present day... but then why was everyone dressing like it was 1980, driving old cars and using antiquated equipment like enormous shoulder-mount VHS video cameras and oafish hand-held phones?

There aren’t really any likable or relatable characters anywhere to be found onscreen. Even Benji, who’s meant to be the comparatively sane anchor in a sea of half-wits (which includes Jennifer Coolidge as his beyond-out-of-touch mother), is so drippy that it’s hard to care whether he succeeds or fails. Sam Rockwell pops up occasionally in fantasy/dream sequences, acting out the events in Benji’s version of the novel and in the one plagiarized by Chevalier – in both, he’s sporting nightmare-inducing hair and make-up and doing a LOT of projectile vomiting. To that end, the screenplay seems like it was written by a pair of 14-year-old boys, who wanted to see how many revolting gross-outs, idiotic sexual references (“heh, heh, he said `gonads’!”) and pointless sci-fi mumbo jumbo they could toss into the film’s mercifully brief 90 minutes.

Having said all that, I did like Clement’s pompous, self-important, deep-throated Chevalier, and I do give Hess credit for maintaining a vision that is so very clearly his, and his alone. The problem will be convincing audiences to share that vision... one that is most definitely an acquired taste. At the (free) preview screening I attended, the theater was only about half full, and eight people walked out. Not a good sign.