Jason Mantzoukas is a wonderfully hilarious human being. He regularly riffs on awful movies on the How Did This Get Made? podcast with Paul Scheer and June Diane Raphael, has driven Chris Gethard insane on live television twice, and regularly plays insane goofballs on television. With writer-director Hannah Fidell’s new film The Long Dumb Road, which dropped its first trailer on Thursday, fans of Mantzoukas will now get to see him do just that on the big screen.
According to the official logline from Universal Pictures:
When college-bound teenager Nat (Tony Revolori) offers itinerant 30-something mechanic Richard (Jason Mantzoukas) a ride during a stop-over in small-town Texas, neither one realizes the indelible impact each traveler will have on his respective journey. Nat, an aspiring photographer, is heading towards a bright future in art school in Los Angeles and wants to find the real America en route to new beginnings out West; Richard, a lovably unkempt motormouth, is simply looking for connection in the moment — and maybe a beer or ten — while he grapples with indecision, past mistakes and dead-ends.
Basically, The Long Dumb Road is a road trip movie in the same vein as Vacation, Little Miss Sunshine, and Tommy Boy. So some moviegoers and critics may initially assume it’s just like everything that has come before it. The problem is, none of those films — classics notwithstanding — featured the United Citizens Brigade Theatre alum playing an enraged ex-mechanic who frequently ingests “maybe a beer or ten.”
Aside from Mantzoukas and Revolori, The Long Dumb Road also stars Taissa Farmiga, Grace Gummer, Casey Wilson, and Ron Livingston. It opens theatrically in New York on November 9th, then expands to Los Angeles and other cities on November 16th.
