Movie review: ‘Cedar Rapids’

There is something to be said for allowing yourself simple pleasures like the shtick-y sweetness of “Cedar Rapids.” Its star, Ed Helms, his Colgate smile back after “The Hangover” incident in Vegas, is heading into another life-changing weekend, complete with some dicey morning-after regrets to deal with.

You get a sense of the man right away, as Helms’ Tim Lippe can barely stand still while his much older lover (and former 7th grade teacher, played by Sigourney Weaver), spit-combs his cowlick. He is about to leave the safe haven of Brown Valley, Wis., for the wilds of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and the region’s annual insurance convention, with no clue of the mayhem that’s in store.

Yes, this is a film about a Midwestern small-town insurance agent’s journey of self-discovery, but don’t let that put you off. What helps turn “Cedar Rapids” into such good comic relief is that indie film auteur Miguel Arteta (“Youth in Revolt,” “The Good Girl”) and screenwriter Phil Johnston, himself a Wisconsin native, have a great affection for Tim, a very decent sort, and they’re not afraid to show it — rare in an age when acerbic comedy is more the rage. If anything, the filmmakers (Midwestern writer-director Alexander Payne is a producer) have taken a calculated risk in creating characters to laugh with, rather than at, especially with a cast that also includes John C. Reilly, Stephen Root, Rob Corddry, Kurtwood Smith and others who tend toward more cynical send-ups.

It all begins when a twist of fate sends Tim to the convention instead of Brown Star Insurance’s golden boy. His boss (Root) gives him two directives: Bring back the coveted “Two Diamonds” award marking their agency as the Midwest’s best, and stay away from the treacherous Dean “Deanzie” Ziegler, Reilly’s pot-stirring competitor.

But as luck, and Johnston’s fine debut script, would have it, Tim ends up having to share a hotel room with Deanzie and straight-arrow Ron Wilkes (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), the first black man Tim has ever encountered in the flesh — just one of many firsts for our intrepid boy. Anne Heche as the foxy insurance hotshot and Alia Shawkat as the working girl working the convention round out a very solid clique of new friends that will help Tim muddle through the series of disasters that are about to unfold.

For this, the filmmakers have no new tricks up their sleeves. Instead, they rely on a basic mix of sex, drugs and karaoke, along with some double-dealing betrayals to up the stakes. All old tropes to be sure, but they do a decent job of keeping our hero off balance and the rest of us mostly entertained. The pleasures served up by this decidedly indie fare tend to come in small packages: Ron’s obsession with “The Wire,” which fans of the HBO drama should appreciate since Whitlock was one of its regulars; Tim’s pure enjoyment of the incidentals — “It’s like I’m in Barbados,” he says of the hotel’s indoor pool. On the serious and seriously sentimental side is the heart-to-heart between Helms and Heche on a playground swing set that somehow makes the business of selling insurance seem heroic — all irony set aside.

If that all sounds like a lot of good, clean fun, a word of warning. In what seems to have become the genre’s raison d’etre, the dialogue is so blue at times that you’ll probably feel the heat of the blushing cheeks on either side of you, especially whenever Reilly’s fast-talking savant of smut shows up. But most of the humor is old school, rooted in classic fish-out-of-water situations as Tim swings between absolute delight and total dismay at all this brave new world holds. Even Deanzie, in Reilly’s good-hearted hands, grows on you after a while.

Arteta and cinematographer Chuy Chavez, his collaborator on 2009’s “Youth in Revolt,” have created a picture-perfect town in Brown Valley and a not-too slicked up city in Cedar Rapids. This is a Midwest somehow not ravaged by unemployment and empty factories, wiped clean of pollution, largely devoid of diversity and firmly middle class. The look seems vintage J.C. Penney without being patronizing.

It’s the kind of place where Helms seems at home, but then he helped build it, working with screenwriter Johnston to flesh out Tim’s inner Boy Scout and serving as the film’s executive producer. The actor has made a specialty out of playing the slightly socially awkward ordinary guy — the dentist in “The Hangover,” an earnest correspondent on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” a reliable employee in “The Office.” But in Tim, the actor has put a polish on the persona, layering on old-fashioned virtues and an irrepressible optimism that is hard to resist.

That’s a good fit for a filmmaker as well, who is at his best juggling ordinary lives. Though the comedy in “Cedar Rapids” is Arteta’s broadest yet, the film reflects the care he takes with his cast, the sort that helped reveal an acting depth no one suspected from Jennifer Aniston in 2002’s “The Good Girl.” In “Cedar Rapids,” he has helped a consummate comic sidekick slip into the role of front-and-center funny man.

betsy.sharkey@latimes.com