A pustulant piece of work whose better moments mostly involve Jemaine Clement’s channeling of insufferable condescension, Gentlemen Broncos represents a sort of nadir of comedy, where even meager jokes die sad and unmourned deaths. Like director Jared Hess’ first film, Napoleon Dynamite, it will win points from certain quarters for its faux-naif characterizations and time-warp outfits. But Broncos has none of that film’s gangly punchiness or heartfelt sense of rebellion. Here, it’s all pose, with hardly a laugh in sight.

The screenplay (by the director and his wife Jerusha Hess) starts off promisingly. Moon-faced Benjamin Purvis (Michael Angarano) is packed off by his mother Judith (Jennifer Coolidge) to a writing workshop called the Cletus Festival. On the bus there, a counselor greets his introverted wards with a cheery, “Welcome, homeschoolers!” Once at Cletus, Benjamin faces a Renaissance Fair-like collection of adolescent misfits eager to be schooled in how to hone their scribbled fantasies. The high points come early, in an awkward flirtation between Benjamin and the undeservedly arrogant budding romance novelist Tabatha (Halley Feiffer), and in a wondrously arrogant presentation from famed pulp science-fiction novelist Roland Chevalier (Clement).

A blow-dried disaster in turtlenecks who speaks with a portentously clenched-jaw monotone, Chevalier is a brilliantly obnoxious creation. He’s the kind of small-time self-satisfied artist who haunts writing workshops and treats his audience with an arrogance inversely proportional to his fame. After sitting through Chevalier’s discourse on how to give characters appropriately magical names, a disillusioned Benjamin turns in the manuscript of his magnum opus, Yeast Lords (whose protagonist, Bronco, Chevalier had suggested renaming Broncainous), for a contest to be judged by Chevalier. Stuck for a new idea, Chevalier decides to simply take Benjamin’s work, make a few changes, and publish it as his own.

The spacey recreations of Benjamin’s novel, starring a gloriously over-the-top Sam Rockwell, present a welcome note of otherworldly oddity in this resolutely downbeat setting. Hess shows the story both ways, as he originally wrote it and also as Chevalier retooled it, and either way it’s like some adolescent fever-dream composed of Yes album covers and half-remembered Amazing Stories plots (only with more genital mutilation and transgendered characters).

If this had been the whole of Gentlemen Broncos, Hess might have had something. But once the film leaves the Cletus Festival and the triangle of Benjamin’s love-hate relationship with Chevalier and Tabatha, it staggers around like a wounded animal. Hess litters the film with characters seemingly dropped in from some other comedy that thought of itself as quirky. Coolidge’s Judith is there to make horrible faces and wear worse outfits, while Mike White stands around in a ratty metalhead hairdo and wispy mustache, since those things (combined with the blank expression forced by the director on every actor who’s not mugging for the camera) are apparently automatically funny.

Much of what is supposed to work as comedy in the film is little more than sight gags included only for their anachronistic geekiness. A credit sequence featuring the imagined covers of Chevalier’s works might be spot-on in its recreation of the loony space-opera artwork of old sci-fi paperbacks, but since that kind of design fell out of favor at least a couple decades ago, is he supposed to have not published in the intervening years? The haircuts are all bad and the outfits worse, but there’s only so far that this kind of retro myopia can get you. The ultimate effect -- particularly with the addition of enough vomit- and excrement-related gags to give the Farrellys pause -- is that of watching a painfully obvious amateur skit in some 1980s-era rec room. It’s a claustrophobic universe, and one you can’t wait to escape from.



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