In Jared Hess’ “Gentlemen Broncos,” Michael Angarano is all slumped shoulders and furrowed brows as Benjamin, a home-schooled teen obsessed with low-rent sci-fi. Unlike Hess’ previous films “Napoleon Dynamite” and “Nacho Libre,” our protagonist is an introvert, his love of fiction and adventure expressed through a novel he’s been storyboarding, designing, illustrating, and finally writing, “Yeast Lords.” His rookie novel, following a southern-raised rogue adventurer in the spirit of Buck Rogers as he battles to keep his sperm from being harvested, is just about the only part of Benjamin’s life that elicits a smile.
Benjamin thinks he’s found his hero in iconoclast sci-fi veteran Ronald Chevalier (Jemaine Clement), who’s known for literary achievements like the trilogy of “Cyborg Harpies” novels. He leaps at the chance to have his manuscript judged by Chevalier, but soon Chevalier is openly swiping his idea, changing names and situations to create “The Adventures of Brutus And Balzaak.” In a subplot, we get to see the differences between versions acted out by Sam Rockwell, first as a gibberish-spouting country bumpkin and then as a flying transsexual. Both versions retain a generous collection of cyclopes and surveillance deer, in addition to low-fi action sequences and various non-sequiters revolving around ‘nads.’
Hess has grown as a filmmaker, but he still tempers his interest in fringe oddballs with sitcom-style humor. Moments like the unveiling of Benjamin’s mother’s tacky fashion line, where the audience is given the chance to weigh in as to whether these oddball touches deepen the characters, are cheapened by reaction shots from others present in the scene. It’s not enough that a guardian angel from the church has to carry a snake around his neck for most of the film’s runtime— the snake has to take a huge shit onscreen, too. And Hess seems to have fallen in love with Hector Jimenez, the sidekick from “Nacho Libre,” here playing an otherwise unremarkable amateur filmmaker with the exact same lip-smacking mannerisms as the low rent luchador in Hess’ previous film.
It’s hard to ascertain exactly what sort of dramatic weight we’re meant to give the proceedings. Moreso than Hess’ previous films, none of this appears to be of any weighted importance. Benjamin’s manuscript ends up in the hands of Jimenez’ amateur filmmaker, but we know early on that despite eighty features under his belt, the man’s a total sham. Benjamin’s relationship with a greedy ingenue is also an afterthought, while the main conceit, that of Chevalier committing plagiarism, a dramatic conflict with a few very basic, easy resolutions. And if Benjamin is capable of creating termite art with his prose, why are the recreations from both his and Chevalier’s imaginations so similar? Who should we be celebrating, the newcomer who has mediocrity in his bones, or the crafty veteran who has run out of steam?
Much of Clement’s work as Chevalier forms the funnier bits and pieces of the film. With his basso profoundo timbre, puffed-up hair and suave sweater vests, Chevalier is a comic creation that provides mileage in the way of misplaced ego combined with a faked all-world wisdom. In one particular standout scene, he showcases his entire ethos in a simple name-creating exercise, supposing that adding inane suffixes to already-normal names helps improve and not pointlessly complicate things. Highlights also include the surprisingly sad work from Angarano and the typically hysterical clowning from Rockwell, but our favorite part was probably the opening credits. As Zager & Evans’ “In The Year 2525” plays (an awesome must-listen track if you’ve never heard it), we see the credits superimposed on a series of increasingly awesome sci-fi-lit paperbacks, none of which we would be surprised to hear are real. In a year of fun opening credit sequences, this one is near the top of the list. It’s too bad that seems to be all that Hess is especially good at. [C]