Idiots

by Mike McGranaghan

Davis (O’Shea Jackson) is a young Christian man who tries to do good but is often undone by naivety. Mark (Dave Franco) is a loose cannon with a taste for drugs and women. These two diametrically opposed characters team up for an outrageous adventure in Idiots, the enjoyably demented new comedy from The Toxic Avenger director Macon Blair.

Down on their luck, both men find themselves working for a shady company run by India Dorindo (Grace Junot). Their job is to transport spoiled rich kid Sherdian (Mason Thames) to a treatment facility. The social media-famous Sheridan has no intention of making the trip easy. He repeatedly sabotages Davis and Mark, and when he escapes, they have to team up with stripper Irina (Kiernan Shipka) to find him. This puts them in contact with an assortment of strange people, not the least of which is Koko (Peter Dinklage), a kind of self-styled bounty hunter.

A plot description does nothing to convey the tone of Idiots (which screened at this year’s Sundance Film Festival under its better original title, The Shitheads) so I’ll try to explain the experience of watching it. The story utilizes a soda spiked with tranquilizers and laxatives, Irina’s badass grandma wielding a knife, a group of angry cocaine-fueled businessmen in their underwear, and an aspiring rapper named Pricka Bush da Werewolf. That last one, incidentally, is played by Nicholas Braun in an uproarious, scene-stealing performance.

Whereas most films travel between plot points with a certain kind of cohesion, Blair’s approach is different. Instead of going from A to B to C, he goes from A to Y to K. His operating principle seems to be, “What can I insert right here that will be the most unexpected thing imaginable?” Not everyone can pull off that sort of approach, but he can. The picture veers and weaves so often that predicting where it will go next is impossible. That gives it a fun, freewheeling vibe, getting you to laugh as much at the audacity as you do the actual content (although that’s funny, too). A manic pace drives the whole thing, giving you barely enough time to process one bizarre event before the next one unfolds.

Strong casting adds to the effect. Jackson and Franco are quite a pair onscreen, continually finding funny ways to have their characters’ personalities clash. What the actors have in common is the good sense to play the material seriously, as though Davis and Mark don’t realize they’re in a comedy movie. Thames is the cherry on top, providing Sheridan with a wicked gleam in his eye to indicate a fundamental belief that being rich gives him the right to mess with anyone he wants, however he wants, whenever he chooses. On her end, Shipka avoids the cliches of cinematic strippers, giving Irina a fierce sense of street-smart intelligence to match her no-BS attitude.

Idiots - not be confused with this year’s Nimrods, which also stars Mason Thames – is a very wild wide, filled with big laughs and more WTF? moments than you can shake a stick at. And if it occasionally feels like it’s going off the rails, that’s just another part of the appeal.