They’re universal experiences: Leaving home, making new friends, facing peer pressure, falling for your teacher, having sex (not with the teacher) and realising that adults aren’t always right. The inherent trials and tribulations of coming-of-age stories have always made great comedies, and Cedar Rapids proves a sweet and funny addition to the genre. Well, with one minor difference: Cedar Rapids isn’t about teenagers. It’s about a middle-aged insurance salesman.
Bizarrely marketed as a follow-up to The Hangover, Cedar Rapids is a much more endearing comedy than the trailer implies. Ed ‘That Guy From The Hangover and the American Version of The Office’ Helms plays the dorky and naïve Tim Lippe, who’s sent to an insurance conference in Iowa to make a presentation and secure a coveted industry award. As he enthusiastically meanders through a perfectly realised world of cringe-worthy team-bonding exercises, midlife crises and industry politics, we’re introduced to the real, laughably uncool version of middle America. If George Clooney and Vera Farmiga played the prom king and queen of travelling business people in Up in The Air, this is the story of the school geeks.
And the geeks in this case are the prudish Isiah Whitlock Jr., whose idea of cool is using acronyms like NTS for “not too shabby” (fans of The Wire look out for his fantastic in-joke), the free-spirited Anne Heche and the obnoxious loudmouth John C. Reilly, who steals every scene with his vulgar one-liners.
Though Tim and his new-found posse get drunk, meet prostitutes, take drugs and get into fights, it’s not the outrageous situations that provide the comedy, but how the endearingly awkward and over-eager Helms reacts to them. As he gives heartfelt speeches to hookers about how they can do better and asserts that insurance agents are heroes because they come in after disasters and help fix people’s lives, you believe him, and find yourself rooting for this awkward man-child and his friends every step of the way.
The ending may be thoroughly predictable and the soundtrack overly indie, but warm characters and hilarious moments mean Cedar Rapids is NTS at all.