Paul Rudd and Steve Coogan in Ideal Home (Brainstorm Media)

Ideal Home is simultaneously a throwback and of its time. It is essentially an average film with some decent laughs and a heartfelt lesson of belonging and learning to grow up, even when you’re an adult. In the 1990s, it would have been the perfect Steve Martin/Goldie Hawn vehicle. But it’s 2018, and the couple that needs to learn to change is played by Steve Coogan and Paul Rudd, and they do so with the help of a 10-year-old boy.

Coogan plays Erasmus, a second- and possibly third-rate cooking show host based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Rudd plays his partner, Paul, who produces the show. They bicker and make up and party and dance in a home that seems suspiciously ornate for the star of a second- and possibly third-rate cooking show. Anyway, they are comfortable with their lifestyle, if not particularly happy. Along comes Angel, who prefers to be called Bill, who presents himself as Erasmus’s grandson. His dad is in jail and has asked Erasmus to temporarily care for Bill. Paul, who had no idea that Erasmus had ever slept with a woman, much less fathered a son, is understandably perturbed, but he goes along and, well, you know what happens next.

The fact that the couple is gay is integral to the humor in the sense that it’s integral to the character’s lives. There is no judgment of them from anyone at any moment. At one point, Erasmus asks his son if he cares that his father has a male partner, and the son gives an incredulous “No.” At a birthday party, a kid asks Bill if he has two dads. Bill thinks about it for a moment before he states, “I guess I do.”

Ideal Home is charming, funny, and ever so slightly dull, yet director Andrew Fleming knows his way around a good comedy. He wrote and directed The Craft, Threesome, and the highly underrated political farce Dick. He manages to bring a level of craft here not normally scene in a Paul Rudd film, where everyone improvises until somebody finally says something funny before there’s a cut to the next scene.

Fleming has written a tight and streamlined script. Even so, Ideal Home never takes off. It’s a comedy that seems to be operating entirely in second gear. It’s pleasant enough, but you desperately want to feel the lurch in your stomach that a good comedy gives as it achieves lift off. Instead you settle for moments. There is a hilarious bit where Erasmus instructs a production assistant how to meticulously arrange a throw rug so that it looks, well, thrown. And in the midst of a party the men are hosting and just after they had a heated argument, Erasmus asks Paul if he wants oral sex. Paul contemplates it for the perfect amount of time before announcing, “Nah, we have guests.”

Ideal Home, in the long run, is good enough.