In Role Models, Paul Rudd plays a man whose job is to give anti-drug presentations at school assemblies that are in fact thinly veiled commercials for a particularly foul-looking energy drink. It’s a job that’s pretty much designed to make anybody who does it hate himself — and Rudd has been doing it for 10 goddammed years. He’s an interesting variation on the “overgrown manchild” character that’s become so common in American comedy: he has the emotional immaturity of an adolescent, but it’s combined with the joyless cynicism of a grumpy retiree. No wonder his girlfriend (Elizabeth Banks) has decided to break up with him.Role Models is Rudd’s first feature screenplay (Ken Marino, Timothy Dowling, and director David Wain are also credited as co-writers), and he keeps his character walking a very fine line — he’s a dick, but his blunt impatience with bullshit of any kind is amusing enough to keep him barely likeable. (He won me over at a campfire scene; asked to tell a scary story, he looks around at the 10-year-olds gathered around him and proceeds to fill them in on the details of the international sex trade.)
The plot kicks into action when a judge sentences Rudd and his co-worker Seann William Scott to 150 hours of community service as an alternative to prison — Rudd went on a destructive tirade after getting dumped, and Scott wound up taking the fall for the damage as well — which they serve at a Big Brother-like organization called “Sturdy Wings.” Scott is paired up with a scarily sex-obsessed black kid named Ronnie (Bobb’e J. Thompson), while Rudd gets an older kid, a geek and ardent LARPer played by Christopher “McLovin” Mintz-Plasse.
With David Wain directing, I was hoping Role Models would contain a few surreal comic tangents to rival the talking can of beans from Wet Hot American Summer, the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses CAT scan machine buying spree from The Ten, or pretty much anything that ever happened on the TV show Stella. But Wain shows surprising restraint here, especially for someone who previously seemed as though he couldn’t stick to a straightforward story if you held a gun to his head. Role Models has a standard-issue “redemption of an asshole” story arc, but the actors are all believable, and Wain and Rudd earn a lot of goodwill with their loving depiction of the LARP subculture, in all its nerdy glory. (Admirably, they make sure each of the LARPers is a very specific type of geek, from Joe Lo Truglio’s hearty knight, who commits to the Olde English slang with hilarious gusto, to Ken Jeong’s smarmy King Argotron, haughtily holding court even at the burger joint where he and his buddies eat before every battle.)
They’ve also written a fantastic role for Jane Lynch — easily her best and juiciest part since she played the lesbian dog trainer in Best in Show. Here she’s Gayle Sweeny, a former drug addict (“You know what I would have for breakfast? Cocaine! You know what I’d have for lunch? Cocaine!”) who now runs Sturdy Wings with a combination of intimidation, positive energy, self-righteousness, and imperfectly worded tough-talk aphorisms. A former “user, boozer, and loser,” she’s like a much, much better-adjusted version of Jerri Blank from Strangers With Candy.
Role Models never quite takes off into the comic stratosphere, but it gives you a few good laughs (including a hilarious two-percenter about Christopher Mintz-Plasse looking like “the young Marvin Hamlisch”) and it doesn’t do anything to annoy you the rest of the time. And it also gives you Paul Rudd in Paul Stanley KISS makeup carrying a foam-rubber sword, and I’d have to be crazy not to recommend a movie with that in it.
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