Zimbio Movie Review: 'Gentlemen Broncos'

(L-R) Actors Halley Feiffer and Michael Angarano, director and co-writer Jared Hess, Q&A Josh Horowitz, and actors Josh Pais, Sam Rockwell and Michael White attend the afterparty for a screening of "Gentlemen Broncos" at Tribeca Cinemas on October 26, 2009 in New York City. (Getty Images)more pics » DON'T MISS

• 7 Questions with Jared and Jerusha Hess of Gentlemen Broncos
  

If you liked Napoleon Dynamite, you'll probably like Gentlemen Broncos -- just not as much. Like Jared Hess's first film, Broncos centers around the quintessential misfit, an aspiring science-fiction and fantasy writer named Benjamin Purvis. If Napoleon was awkward, Benjamin is just downright bleak, portrayed by a despondent but vengeful Michael Angarano. He lives with his mother, a wannabe nightgown designer captured by Jennifer Coolidge, in an igloo-shaped house decorated with girly lace and floral wallpaper. His geeky ambitions haven't earned him any friends, and even the kids he meets at the Cletus Fest, a veritable nerd convention, don't quite connect with him.

Jemaine Clement as Ronald Chevalier (via IWatchStuff.com)
But Benjamin does meet someone at the festival who captures his attention: his idol Ronald Chevalier, a sci-fi novelist prodigy turned first-class douche (portrayed perfectly by Jemaine Clement), who disappoints his biggest fan with his arrogance and condescension. Benjamin submits his fantasy masterpiece Yeast Lords to a competition judged by Chevalier, whose own recent projects have been mostly garbage. Facing pressure from his publisher, Chevalier passes Yeast Lords off as his own, changing a few names and re-titling it Brutus and Balzaac. Discouraged and fed up, Benjamin fights to regain control of his work, and his life.

One of the most memorable aspects of Gentlemen Broncos is Jared Hess's portrayal of rural American culture and the characters it breeds. The simple, humble aesthetic is so realistic that it's almost depressing -- at the same time that it's a celebration of the ordinary. Like Napoleon Dynamite, the film features a host of hilarious, unaware characters in cartoon-ish roles: his mother makes popcorn balls and forces him to sell them on the street for extra cash while wearing a tacky homemade sweater, while a peer named Lonnie Donaho (Hector Jimenez) produces low-budget, makeshift "films" acted out by his friends. The only character who manages to maintain this one-dimensionality without losing the audience's interest is Clement's Chevalier. His turtleneck sweaters and bluetooth headset are just a jumping off point for a pompous Michael York-style showoff who gets a laugh every time he opens his mouth. His performance is reason enough to go see the movie.

But the genius of Napoleon Dynamite was in the quirky characters and how they interact with one another, and it's here that Gentlemen Broncos falls flat. The plot overshadows the characters themselves, and the only relationship that really shines in the film is the one between Benjamin and his mother. Everyone else relies on gross-out humor and oddball behavior for quick laughs that don't do anything to deepen the bonds between the characters or to hold up the storyline. Between snakes pooping and vomit-covered kisses, no one manages to garner much sympathy.

A saving grace comes when audiences are treated to snippets of Yeast Lords, which show Benjamin's fictional hero Bronco (a brutish Sam Rockwell) battling Cyclops armies and cyborg deer with built-in ammunition. Once his novel is bastardized by Chevalier, however, Bronco -- now Brutus -- becomes an effeminate and grating personality with a Donatella Versace wig and a snarl. These different interpretations of a 17-year-old kid's story, particularly in the low-budget, outlandish style in which Hess portrays them, are some of the film's highlights. It doesn't hurt that Rockwell holds absolutely nothing back from these performances.

Gentlemen Broncos offers a peek into the lives and minds of a teenage sci-fi geek and his self-important idol, all in Hess's signature style of charming banality. But because we can't see how his wild adventure has brought him any closer to the people around him, we're just not cheering for Benjamin as loudly as we were for Napoleon.

Zimbio Grade: B

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