Mister America is billed as a comedy, but rarely have I seen a film so deeply unfunny. There is certainly a precedent for building a comedy around a clueless, deeply unpleasant person, but generally the performer playing that character should have some kind of charisma and, well, something funny to say. Tim Heidecker has neither.

Heidecker has credits, though. He’s an alternative comedian who hosts a faux-movie review web series with another alternative comedian, Gregg Turlington, called On Cinema. Mister America takes these characters out of their element and places them in an hour and a half movie. Unfortunately, Turlington and Heidecker, along with director Eric Notarnicola, haven’t learned from Saturday Night Live‘s producer Lorne Michael’s lesson that not every sketch character deserves a full 90 minutes’ worth of attention.

The mockumentary follows Tim Heidecker (Heidecker) as he campaigns for district attorney of San Bernardino, California. The joke is that no one knows who he is or that he’s running. His campaign manager (and only employee) was a juror on his murder trial and the reason for his acquittal. She was the only holdout for a guilty plea: he was charged with selling faulty e-cigarettes at a techno festival that were responsible for a baker’s dozen of deaths. Hysterical. Anyway, his idea of a vendetta is to take down the DA who tried him. All in all, not a terrible idea for a story, but the humor here is so dry, it’s arid. The script’s idea of a great running gag is having the main character own an Apple watch that he’s not quite sure how to use.

Gregg Turlington—playing, of course, Gregg Turlington—provides some chuckles as Heidecker’s former movie show co-host who is obsessed with deservedly obscure movies. He is Heidecker’s actual nemesis, and he constantly brings up Heidecker’s incompetence. Here is another gag: the filmmakers aren’t particularly interested in his story, which annoys Turlington to no end. Best known as anti-comic Neal Hamburger, Turlington is legitimately very funny, and the movie lifts up considerably when focusing on him.

Unfortunately, the focus is squarely on Heidecker, who may be funny elsewhere, but here he’s just excruciating to watch. Mistaking jockish obnoxiousness for humor, he blunders and blusters his way through an hour and a half of incompetence and belligerence and delivers perhaps five funny lines. There is a fairly amusing bit where he attempts some impassioned rhetoric while claiming kinship with Martin Luther King Jr. while standing and bloviating in front of a statue of the civil rights leader. But for the most part, Mister America commits the cardinal sin of not just comedies but movies altogether. It’s dull.