Nerd appeal

Evan (Michael Cera, left), Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, centre) and Seth (Jonah Hill), get an online anatomy lesson in Superbad. (Melissa Moseley/Columbia Pictures)

The characters bred in the funny lab of Judd Apatow — writer-director of The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked-Up — live with the constant, aching awareness of their uncool stature. These guys look different from more recent kings of comedy like Adam Sandler and Jim Carrey. Those guys might not have been cool, but they thought they were. Even the subliterate morons in Dumb and Dumber — experts in diarrhea who couldn’t tell the difference between Austria and Australia — truly believed they had a special way with the ladies. In the Apatow universe, the subject may be aging virgins or unemployed 23-year-old daddies-to-be, but the laughs aren’t ironic because there’s no distance between the implied and the real. These guys — and they’re pretty much all guys — are losers, and they know we know they are because they know they are.

Into this money-raking oeuvre lurches Superbad, produced by Apatow and directed by Greg Mottola (The Daytrippers) from a script by Apatow proteges Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. Seth (Jonah Hill) and Evan (Michael Cera) — no baby-name books available to the writers, apparently — are high school seniors of the lowest caste trying to procure alcohol for a grad party they can’t believe they’ve been invited to. The get-laid strategy of these dorky, essentially decent guys is the faint hope that if the girls get drunk enough, they’ll have sex with them by accident. “We could be that mistake!” crows Seth. Comedy, frequently the domain of cock-of-the-walker narcissists like Eddie Murphy and Vince Vaughn, is firmly back in the hands of the nebbishes these days. The Apatow disciples are Woody Allen with the neuroses, but without the urbanity, or the superiority.

Rogen and Goldberg started writing the Superbad script when they were teenagers back in Vancouver. Following the path of seminal rite-of-passage grad films like American Graffiti and Dazed and Confused, Superbad takes place in the last hours of high school, where the itinerary is simple: Party, puke, leave childhood behind. Pray for sex somewhere in between.

The writers are barely 25, and the adolescent memories — or as some call them, wounds — still feel fresh (weeping, in fact). Best friends Evan and Seth are united by their troubling, opposite body types: Evan is gangly, with hair like an acorn and vaguely synthetic clothes that look like his mom ordered them from a catalogue circa 1981. Seth is all Dorito-puff; he appears not to have ingested anything found in nature in years, except perhaps pot. In long, bantering scenes, the two oscillate between whip-smart observations about high school life and unbearable misinterpretation, their every sentence and thought thrumming with sex. This is profane, unrepeatable stuff; it’s not really for kids, but about them. Seth makes Borat seem restrained.

Yet the boys’ relationship to sex is entirely electronic. They are the internet porn generation, digitally experienced and overflowing with information. But in the end, kids are still kids, and actual skin-on-skin contact (that’s not their own) is still a rarity. Confronted by a real, live girl, one who seems smart and open and — good lord — possibly interested, Evan falls apart entirely, slipping into a standing coma in a high school hallway, talking in circles. Oh, the accuracy. Oh, the pain.

Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, right) gets asked for some identification by Officer Michael (Seth Rogen, left) and Officer Slater (Bill Hader) at a liquor store. (Melissa Moseley/Columbia Pictures)

To get the booze, the duo enlists fellow outcast Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), he of the adenoidal issues and, presumably, an extensive collection of fantasy fiction. Fogell is tolerated because he has a fake ID from Hawaii on which he goes by the single moniker McLovin, like Charo or Sting. Remarkably, the ID is almost sufficient to land the drinks, but standing at the cash in a liquor store, with the Holy Grail alcohol in hand, Fogell gets caught in the crossfire of a holdup and lands in the back of a police cruiser. Bad luck, meet good luck: it’s driven by two cops (Rogen and Saturday Night Live’s Bill Hader) who are actually less mature than Fogell is. While the supreme nerd spends a chunk of the evening drinking with his new cop buddies and firing their guns, Seth and Evan keep getting stalled themselves. Cars hit them, adults attack them and the boys sprint across hissing suburban lawns like clumsy Ferris Buellers.

All of this revs up Seth to a point of near hysteria. Hill plays him — sometimes overplays — as an explosive, hand-flapping, porn-addicted monkey man. In contrast, Cera is an ethereal figure. He delivered his lines on the short-lived, long-adored TV comedy Arrested Development with such mannequin stillness that he seemed hilariously, barely visible. But Cera has quite a presence for someone whose method is to be slight. In one scene, trapped at a party with a group of grizzled older guys (remember how terrifying and otherworldly people in their 20s seemed when you were in high school?) who just hoovered several pounds of cocaine, he’s goaded into singing the Guess Who song These Eyes a cappella. Cera’s granny twitter voice and heaving bird dance are a piece of perfectly controlled physical comedy.

Though the point is to get laid, there’s another, different romantic undertone to the night. Only Evan got into Dartmouth, and the two friends are, in effect, splitting up. Really, this is a love story about two people who can’t be together anymore. That the film doesn’t retreat from this theme, but allows it to play out, not to any erotic conclusion, but to a gentle disintegration, is an act of bravery: most comedians are happy to fill any pause between breast jokes with a big ol’ homophobic slur. Superbad has the confidence not to bother. It’s one of the first teen comedies I’ve seen where excessive drinking comes off as really stupid, and boys are allowed to look longingly at one another as they go off with the girls. The look says: Male bonding is easy, but this next thing, this adult thing involving women, is going to be much more complicated, and there’s some sensation of loss in that.

Superbad is way too long, way too profane — an endless menstruation gag feels unduly fearful and nasty — and almost everything involving the cops should have been left back in Grade 9. Yet, the film emerges charming somehow. I’m not sure if all these half-formed, amorphous young men who keep popping up in comedies are seriously damaged, inert in the face of war or numb from video games. But they seem preferable to me than the white man’s anger of the Jackass crew, or the adult adolescence of a Rob Schneider film. As all the smart girls know, the nerds are the ones to watch.

Superbad opens across Canada Aug. 17.

Katrina Onstad writes about arts for CBCNews.ca.

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