Sam Eidson as Scott in Zero Charisma (Tribeca Film)

Zero Charisma could be described as the geek version of Big Fan. If memory serves, an obsessive sports fan (Patton Oswalt) takes his passion way too seriously. An outsider, mostly by choice but also by his temperament, has a dysfunctional relationship with his immediate family and has an “other” as a sort of nemesis.

So too in Zero Charisma we get another social maladroit, Scott, played by Sam Eidson, as a kind of Kevin Smith-gone-wrong, a self-described “game master” who has his own sort of role-playing Dungeons & Dragons game, with his own hand-painted figurines. He belongs to a group of fellow nerd friends who have been at it for years (some for too long apparently, as one member early on has to leave, for good, under threat of a finished marriage). Scott lives with his grandmother, and has to put up with the routinely Rupert Pupkin-esque interruptions (like “Help me open this jar!”/“I’m playing a game!”).

What drives the surface conflict, which you know will reach a boiling point sooner or later, is the new guy replacing the former member of the group. Miles (Garrett Graham) may have a nerdy façade and know intricate details about the Millennium Falcon vs. Voyager airships (though the nerd discussions kind of start and stop there outside of the made-up game talk, which will go over the head of anyone not already a hardcore gamer).

But Mile’s everything Scott is not. Successful as an artist and writer, he has a steady, beautiful girlfriend (Katie Folger), and is naturally funny and affable. Needless to say, Scott can’t stand him. On top of this, following Scott’s grandmother having a stroke, his mother, Barbara (an excellent Cyndi Williams), comes to visit with some plans of her own that mess up Scott’s living situation. Oh boy.

The scenario, though, is one seen in many Will Ferrell or Judd Apatow comedies—the man-child who is just too stubborn or too set in his ways to grow/man up. But the filmmakers here are attempting something more admirable, and really much darker among other cringe-comedy movies out there (again, Big Fan is a “comedy,” but if you laugh in some parts there may be something wrong with you). The dichotomy between Scott and Miles is what pushes the film to its sort of tragic-comic conclusions, and by the end neither one really comes off well, but for the filmmakers neither person is entirely appealing or unappealing (Miles is the hip Internet-film writer guy, and Scott… has gaming and fantasy posters in his bedroom).

Eidson makes sure that scenes of Scott being full of himself, making interactions so awkward to the point of chilling the room to an arctic freeze, feel authentic: scenes of him crying in a bathroom while others laugh outside or when he just simply spills some ketchup on his Master Gamer planning sheet. His range is limited based on his voice and his body type (he’s a big guy, not unlike Ethan Suplee, an actor you might recall from Mallrats as declaring “There is no Easter bunny,” but I digress). But for what he’s asked to do and how the other actors react to him, he conveys the truth in all of his insecurity and rage. The change in Scott is subtle, though it’s easy to miss.

It should be noted that, unlike my continued comparison Big Fan, this is funnier than it has a right to be, and much of this can be credited to Andrew Matthews’ script. Certain exchanges are just irresistible (Scott on being called out for being a liar: “I’m the game master!” “So was Nixon.”) and there are plenty of laugh-with-your-hands-over-your-face moments with Scott’s family. The mother and grandmother reveal so much that we know how Scott turned out the way he is— for worse and for, um… we’ll just leave it at that. Zero Charisma is a biting dramedy that deals in some familiar tropes of the man-child within a niche in pop culture, with a fresh, darkly moving perspective.