[rating=9.00]
There’s a lot that gets explained about the character of Lenny in the opening scene of Middle Man, which just wrapped up a couple of screenings during the Austin Film Festival. Played by Parks and Recreation’s Jim O’Heir, he looks down at the body of his mother, laying in her coffin at her funeral. Bothered by her rather plain expression — the kind most corpses have, mind you — he reaches down and pushes up the corners of her mouth, making it look like she’s smiling. The action puts one of Lenny’s face, too, though it’s soon removed after learning she’s left him nothing but massive debt and her old 1953 Oldsmobile.
Realizing his own mortality, Lenny decides to follow his life-long dream: to become a stand-up comedian, despite the fact that he’s just not a funny guy. He quits his job as an accountant, packs up his late mother’s car and heads off through the desert, intent on arriving in Las Vegas to take part in a stand-up talent competition. It’s while on this journey that he meets Hitch (Andrew J. West), a drifter who convinces Lenny to try his stand-up set at a comedy open mic on their way out to Vegas.
Lenny’s set, it turns out, is mostly cobbled together 50s-era dad jokes and miscellaneous puns, an array of antiquated punchlines delivered by stuttering, unfunny former accountant. After a disastrous performance, Lenny’s nerves get the best of him, and after vomiting in the parking lot, he encounters a heckler, who soon winds up dead.
Now faced with having to dispose of a body of someone he may or may not have killed, a near-catatonic Lenny is urged by Hitch to try out his comedy once again. His second night on stage, he stands there, his clothes stained with dirt and blood, Lenny tries to confess his crimes, describing the frustrating details of what it takes to bury a body.
The crowd, of course, goes wild.
Lenny becomes a comedy sensation, igniting a rivalry with a local superstar, T-Bird (The Walking Dead’s Josh McDermitt) and little by little being drawn into a surreal, blood-splattered odyssey in the Nevada desert. While a scathing critique of America’s fame-thirsty culture, Middle Man is also a purely dark comedy that examines the very nature of dark comedy itself.
O’Heir gets a chance to subvert his own typecasting, starting out as the same lovable screw-up we came to love over Parks and Recreation’s seven seasons, who becomes warped by his own expectations of fame and humor. Between O’Heir’s performance and the superbly uneasy tone woven throughout by writer/director Ned Crowley, it seems to almost inadvertently channel the 1981 dark comedy Neighbors, which found John Belushi in the role of a straight man who slowly becomes unhinged thanks to the circumstances around him.
Given that we spend so much time in Lenny’s head, the film even plays fast and loose with the narrative, allowing the viewer to make their own conclusions about what’s really going on out in the badlands of Nevada. A superbly crafted, intricately demented tale that manages to critique the nature of dark comedy while simultaneously indulging in it.
