Cedar Rapids Likable stars ensure great visit to 'Cedar Rapids'

Cedar Rapids
In Cedar Rapids, Ed Helms plays a man-child in the promised land of insurance agencies.

Helms gives sheltered Tim Lippe a pitch-perfect goofball innocence. Tim, 34, is so small-town that he has never set foot on a plane or ventured from his nondescript Wisconsin town.

Though Helms' performance as a sheltered insurance agent has echoes of Steve Carrell's The 40 Year Old Virgin, Tim is not exactly an untrammeled lad. Living out his boyhood fantasies, he has stumbled into weekly dalliances with his seventh-grade teacher Mrs. Vanderhei (hilariously played by Sigourney Weaver).

After one of their bouts of afternoon delight, a bizarre accident befalls the insurance agency's superstar (Thomas Lennon). Tim is cast out of his comfort zone and trundled off to an industry convention, instructed to bring back the coveted Two Diamond Award.

A convention in an big Iowa city is like a journey to an exotic land for Tim. He's somewhat shocked to find he's sharing a hotel room with a black insurance salesman. (Tim's not a racist, just an extremely unworldly guy.) His roommate, Ronald Wilkes (The Wire's Isiah Whitlock Jr. in a very funny turn), proves nearly as strait-laced as Tim.

But their third roommate makes up for the pair's reserve with his party animal behavior. He's Dean "Deanzie" Ziegler, played with scene-stealing improvisational flair by John C. Reilly.

The trio end up hanging out with flirty redhead Joan Ostrowski-Fox (Anne Heche), a working mom with a conventioneer's zeal to escape her mundane life.

Cedar Rapids

* * * (out of four)

Stars: Ed Helms, John C. Reilly, Anne Heche, Isiah Whitlock Jr.
Director: Miguel Arteta
Distributor: Fox Searchlight
Rating: R for crude and sexual content, language and drug use
Running time: 1 hour, 26 minutes
Opens Friday in select cities

This is a Frank Capra-meets-Judd Apatow comedy with a sweetness-laced ribaldry. Insurance salesmen gone wild hardly seems the stuff of comical farce, but in the hands of director Miguel Arteta, the slight story comes off better than it should.

Arteta approaches Tim with affection, making for a surprisingly good-natured satire, lighter than his previous films, 2000's Chuck and Buck, 2002's The Good Girl and 2009's Youth in Revolt. In those darker stories, Arteta also explored the minds of offbeat innocents, but Tim is the most accessible of the lot.

Reilly is over-the-top hilarious, and Helms builds on the likability he exuded in The Hangover, capturing Tim's yearning and decency. Heche brings sharp comic timing to her multidimensional character; Whitlock has some of the film's funniest moments.

The appeal lies primarily in the charismatic performances of this unlikely foursome. They play off one another with the kind of nimble ease you see in the best TV comedy ensembles.

Cedar Rapids is a genially rowdy comedy that stops short of poking fun at small-town Midwesterners. Like its guileless lead character, the film's heart remains steadfastly in the right place.

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