Nerd humour is an acquired taste. Some get it right (Wayne’s World), Saturday Night Live alumni frequently get it wrong (Black Sheep). Fortunately, this is territory that Jon Waters might recognise yet is disturbingly, creepily kitsch in its depiction of a card-carrying teenage dork and his equally oddball family – Dynamite’s lisping, thirty-two year old, net-slave brother and their nylon clad uncle. Rather like its mumbling, rambling protagonist, Napoleon Dynamite takes its time to make a point, but they’re points worth waiting for. Teenage years are difficult enough without being in the centre of a small-town freak-show even if the triumphantly uncool Dynamite (Jon Heder) remains oblivious to his shortcomings while ambling from school election to Prom night and his Big Moment.

Writer / director Jared Hess luxuriates in small-town quirk, such as the Happy Hands Club who perform Bette Midler’s The Rose in sign language, but does so without the arch air of many indie colleagues who cast their cameras over similar landscapes. He ensures that a whiff of satirical truth and familiarity permeates the cringe-inducing cuckoo-comedy – only a boorish martial arts instructor tips into caricature. The rest of his bag of nuts are painfully funny, mostly because at some time or another, you were probably one of them. Fortunately for Napoleon, he can’t see it. Deadpan is a welcome rarity in American cinema and Heder’s desert-dry delivery secures Napoleon Dynamite its comic edge and inevitable cult-status. The film’s clear-eyed calm sets it above lunacy no matter how distressingly whacked it all becomes. What’s more, Dynamite believes he is entitled to be happy, and who can deny anyone that?

// COLIN FRASER