Next up in her noncareer, it’s a pseudo-docu-romcom

“It’s insane that someone believed in us and gave us the money to do this,” Charlyne Yi says. The performer, best known for her role as the Seth Rogen character’s stoner friend Jodi in “Knocked Up,” is speaking of her new film, the romantic comedy “Paper Heart,” opening Aug. 7. Yi co-wrote the script and the music, served as one of the executive producers and made puppets. Adds Yi, “This whole movie, we didn’t know what we were doing.”

A hybrid movie in form and content, Yi plays a character named, well, Charlyne Yi, a young woman who can’t wrap her head around the concept of love. To learn more about it, she decides to document love stories across the country with her director friend Jasenovec (named for her friend and co-writer Nicholas Jasenovec and played by Jake Johnson). The puppets come into play in animated “action scenes,” reenacting tales of how the couples met.

As the film progresses, a romance develops between Yi and a character named Michael Cera, played by actor Michael Cera. The documentary elements mesh with the narrative tale, which looks very much like documentary itself.

At the heart of it all is Yi. In person, she looks just like her character, her long hair back in a ponytail, her eyes wide behind big glasses. She seems equally guileless, with a twist. Talking over a pizza in a quiet cafe, she wants to make it clear that the person onscreen is a character, as is Cera’s, likening the roles to John Malkovich in “Being John Malkovich.”

While she was the driving force behind the film, she admits that “everything scares me,” which makes “Paper Heart” even more of an accomplishment. Her parents’ version of grounding her was to force her to go outside, “because I was afraid of people. I used to almost cry when I had to go in front of the class.”

And yet, soon after moving to L.A., she began performing on comedy stages around town. “I don’t know if it’s stand-up. I don’t want to say it’s performance art. I don’t know what the hell I do,” she declares. Whatever it is, the work has won her a following with fans and peers alike. In the film, she interviews famous friends Rogen, Demetri Martin and “Knocked Up” co-star Martin Starr.

For all of its “Let’s put on a show in the barn” nature, the film won the Waldo Salt screenwriting award at Sundance this year. “It’s such a great feeling to know that you created something that people like, and you can share that with the world that you live in,” Yi says, “however big that world may be.”

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