Idiots

Macon Blair, whose I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore (2017) had the same soft spot for hopeless people in trouble, wrote and directed Idiots, and it starts as the sort of thing he plainly loves: two men bad at their jobs, a car, a job that goes wrong, and a run of strangers each odder than the last. Mark (Dave Franco) and Davis (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) are the drivers. Sheridan (Mason Thames) is the rich teenager in their back seat. The film wants to be a stoner road caper in the Coen manner and also a film about boys who are never made to pay for anything. It manages the first for an hour and the second for about ten minutes, and it runs 100.

The leads are the reason to watch. Franco plays Mark as a man who explains his plans in full to people who did not ask, and Jackson plays Davis as a man who has heard every one of them and has given up interrupting. That is the whole engine of the first hour, two rhythms of talk in a front seat, and it runs without effort. We laughed, a lot and out loud, at how little either of them notices when a scene has turned against them. Franco produced the film as well as leading it, and it is the loosest we have seen him.

Around them Blair has assembled his usual gallery. Nicholas Braun plays a rapper with a gun who calls himself Pricka Bush Da Werewoof, and the best running joke is that Braun says the name as if it were Steven. Peter Dinklage arrives as Karl “Koko” Sandoz and keeps his voice down, which in this company counts as menace. Kiernan Shipka’s Irina Anastas and Lynn Wanlass’s Bodha ‘Baba’ Anastas hold the backwoods stretch, and Blair gives himself a part as D.D and stays out of the way. Not every stop earns its scene; a couple of the encounters exist so that someone can be odd at the camera for three minutes before the car pulls away.

Guillermo Garza shoots it in the flat, bright light of a long afternoon on a two-lane road, so that nothing looks dangerous until it is, and he keeps the camera in the car with the men rather than on the view. Hunter Brown’s production design fills every motel room and roadhouse with things somebody meant to throw out. Karen Freed dresses Mark and Davis like men who bought their clothes for a different job, and Sheridan like money. Brooke Blair and Will Blair’s score is a low, twangy pulse under the driving that knows to stop when a joke needs air. Dane McMaster cuts the first hour fast and clean, and the last thirty minutes as though the film were being described to him from another room.

Then there is Sheridan. Thames plays him as a boy who has never been told no in a tone that meant it, and it is funny. Blair has larger plans for him than annoyance, and Thames is good enough to let us see them coming in a face we had been enjoying going still. It is the best acting in the film. Once Sheridan is what Blair needs him to be, the two men in the front seat are in a different film from the boy in the back, and the script gives them no lines to notice. Blair had the nerve for the first half of the idea and not the second.

Burn After Reading (2008), which this resembles more than once, kept its idiots stupid to the last frame and let the world be the thing that turned nasty. Blair puts the nastiness inside one character instead, which is a better idea, and then lets nobody on screen respond to it, which is not.

Watch it with people and a drink for the first hour, which is as easy a laugh as a road comedy gets. Do not expect the second hour to be the film the first one promised, and if you find yourself reaching for the remote at the sixty-minute mark we would understand.