She's Out of My League is a mood piece. Lacking substance, originality, or a coherent treatment of its putative subject matter -- self-image and the defeatist hierarchies we compose from social and superficial assumptions -- it's the kind of goob-fest that relies almost completely on the amenability of its viewers. But the thing is, if you know that, on the right day, you are entirely capable of losing it over a perfectly delivered sexy yoda joke, a "slapshot regatta" sequence, or even the kind of nasty body humor you might sneer at in a more sensible (or harassed) frame of mind, director Jim Field Smith has made a movie just for you. This can be a tough thing to accept, especially if you (and your horrified seatmates) don't see it coming; there were a couple of points where I thought I might accidentally suffocate myself in my attempt to maintain some kind of cool. Which actually just moves me farther into the ranks of the film's classic band of misfits.
Chief among them is a flimsy nerdlinger named Kirk (Jay Baruchel, returning to form after brilliantly playing against type in Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist). A Pittsburg TSA agent drifting through his mid-twenties, Kirk is pathetically hung up on his ex (Lindsay Sloane), a predicament compounded by the fact that his white trash family has adopted her and her new boyfriend as one of their own. Kirk gets his support from three old friends who also moved directly from high school into the working world ("I wanted to go to college," Kirk says, "but my dad wanted a pool."). There's Stainer (T.J. Miller), an aggro underminer hiding a break-up hurt of his own; Devon (Nate Torrence), the de facto matriarch with a wife at home; and Jack (Mike Vogel), the one who accidentally grew up handsome but refused to defect to the other side. The four actors have an appealing rapport -- as offhandedly sweet as it is determinedly raunchy -- and Miller and Torrence especially enliven pretty standard fare.
But the film's not called Diner, or Funny People, it's She's Out of My League (a potential working title for every other Apatow film) so in struts the plot honey on four-inch stilettos. Party planner (do women do anything else in romantic comedies anymore?) Molly (Alice Eve) is on her way to New York when she drops the jaws -- in hair-ruffling slo-mo -- of everyone at Pittsburgh International. It's an intro about as inspired as the later use of Tal Bachman's easy listening ode to female unattainability. Recently dumped by a first class cad, Molly's looking for a sure thing, and so when Kirk accidentally winds up with her phone, she calls herself to make a date. Compulsively affable, she is another version of Evan Rachel Wood in Whatever Works and Greta Gerwig in the upcoming Greenberg: the fantasy blonde just looking for a damaged whinger to shower with smiles and Lady Di doe eyes.
Subjected to this goddess's attention, Baruchel plays the bewilderment and terror of actually getting what you think you've always wanted perfectly, and the trash-talking debriefs with his crew relieve the incredulity of the coupling at the film's ostensible center. The script (by Sean Anders and John Morris) moves out of its own league when it actually tries to make that coupling work. With nothing convincing to say about class discrepancies and social pressures in relationships or the kind of beauty that the less-than-beautiful can't separate from their own battered self-image, League is most successfully -- once again -- concerned with the eccentric bonds of bromance.
In a different mood I might have had less patience for it, and would definitely have been more put off by the representation of women as either toothy fawns with big, milky boobs or unscrupulous uggos embalmed by their own bitterness. But comedy, like love, is largely a game of chance, and this time it got the girl.