If there was ever a character who defined the belief that life is filled with suffering and sadness, and it is also far too short, it would be the hapless, down-on-his-luck protagonist of Bob Byington’s brilliant and subversive Lousy Carter, in which we are introduced to the titular character, a failed (although he may prefer “failing”) animator who has been forced to take a low-paying job at a small community college where she spends the day teaching a single graduate course on The Great Gatsby, while also being the source of ridicule from faculty and students alike. However, when he is handed the shattering news that he only has six months left to live after being diagnosed with an unnamed terminal illness, he decides now is the time to get his affairs in order. Byington has gradually been working his way up to being one of the more interesting filmmakers currently working in independent cinema – his films are thorny, unconventional and incredibly cynical, but also outrageously funny and sometimes even genuinely heartfelt in some of the quieter moments. Paired with a terrific cast that commits wholeheartedly to helping him realize this sometimes unorthodox vision, the director crafts one of the year’s most layered comedies, taking a relatively simple premise and turning it into something far more effective and nuanced, while also touching on several other subjects that are also filtered through Byington’s more callous approach to the storytelling process. The result is a film that is challenging and harsh, but also irreverent and genuinely quite moving when it wants to be, even at its most unnerving and ferociously awkward, which is the central conceit of the entire film and one of the many reasons it carries the distinctive traits usually associated with the director and his unconventional worldview.

Something we notice quite early on in Lousy Carter is that this is a film in which nothing much happens. It is essentially set over a couple of months. It follows the titular character as he moves through life, trying to make an impression but knowing that he is too mediocre to ever aspire to anything other than the banal existence he has shoehorned himself into as a result of his deep insecurities. This is a brilliantly subversive twist on the hackneyed sub-genre of the tender comedy in which someone learns that they are terminally ill, and does their best to make the most of the little time they have – for Lousy Carter, a man whose name is perfectly reflective of how he sees himself, he is already on the right track, and continuing on this path will eventually get him where he needs to go, or at least allow him to realize the potential even he is starting to doubt he has. It doesn’t make sense, but this is Byington’s modus operandi with several of his films, which are slightly left-of-centre dark comedies about atrociously mediocre people who genuinely believe themselves to be special when in reality they are barely functioning as it stands. The idea of a terminal illness giving someone a new lease on life is horrendously overplayed (even if it can be effective), so Byington deserves kudos for one of the most brilliantly deranged deconstructions of this genre, turning it into a bitter and caustic existential voyage in which we see someone trying to mend the frayed edges of his already unremarkable life, only to essentially continue digging his own grave, just faster and with more intensity as he makes his way to his inevitable death, which he starts to see as something of a relief, considering the very few moments of the reprieve he gets from his uninspiring and frankly quite frustrating existence.

As a film, Lousy Carter navigates a very tricky tightrope when it comes to how it tells this story, and a lot of that has to do with the collision of the plot mechanics and the tone that it takes in bringing these ideas to life. Anyone familiar with Byington’s work knows that, while he may not do it on the same level as some of his peers, he does actively enjoy making viewers uncomfortable, or at least making our journey with these characters slightly less endearing than we may have hoped or anticipated. Throughout the film, he emphasizes the feeling of awkwardness as the titular character gets himself into frequently peculiar and precarious scenarios, from which there is very little chance to escape entirely, which proves to be the foundation for the entire narrative, which is the ramblings of a man who is too self-centred and foolish to realize that he isn’t some great artist, nor does he have the potential to leave a lasting legacy. Instead, he’s a deeply mediocre individual who is as pathetic in what he is told is the final chapter of his life as he was in all the years leading up to it, which sounds like a dreadful and depressing story, but is the root of many of the film’s most intriguing ideas. Lousy Carter is a character study about a man trapped in a perpetual Sissyphean state, doomed to roll the boulder of his own failed dreams and calcified mediocrity, never getting any relief or even so much as a break, even though there were opportunities for him to change his ways and go in a different direction. By the time the film ends, Lousy Carter has indeed met his fate. Still, it is neither in the way we expected, nor something that could not have been avoided with some sense of introspection, which is what makes the film such a delightfully deranged affair, and where it extracts so much of its humour. The coarse, disconcerting tone and the fact that it toggles between satirical dark comedy and genuinely bleak existential drama only underlines the unconventional nature of the premise.

One of Byington’s great traits as a director is that he doesn’t often go with the obvious choices when it comes to selecting the actors to lead his films. He doesn’t write entirely conventional characters, so it makes sense that he would reach out to offer the roles to those who he knows could draw on their more unconventional traits. David Krumholtz has been acting for a long time. While he is rarely the lead (and has recently enjoyed a second wind to his career as a reliable character actor), he is consistently one of the best aspects of whatever project he is working on, since his natural charms and ability to make us extremely invested in otherwise unremarkable characters is a terrific skill. Lousy Carter is the rare leading performance from Krumholtz, and he’s tremendous, playing the part with such vigour and curiosity, which is even more impressive when we realize that this is not a particularly easy part to play when looking at it from a distance. Lousy Carter is a truly pathetic man, albeit one who we can’t help but adore for several reasons, primary amongst them being that he is deeply relatable. Hopefully, no one watching the film is as morally ambigious and ambivalent to existence as he is, but there are traits that many of us (especially those who have ever had any flirtations with academia in some form) will definitely recognize, and which will undeniably resonate with a large portion of the audience. Krumholtz manages to not only handle absolutely everything that the director throws at him but does so in such a way that these obstacles become definitive traits of this character. One of the year’s very best performances, It is always wonderful to see an unheralded actor like Krumholtz get a role that is not only central to the plot, but also genuinely meaningful, and he commands our attention on screen with such incredible honesty and vulnerability (as well as being outrageously funny when he needs to be), turning in exquisite work that will hopefully bring him long overdue recognition.

At a cursory glance, Lousy Carter doesn’t seem to jump out at the viewer. Byington is well-regarded, but except for those who are attuned to his very specific niche of independent filmmaking, he is not widely recognized (at least not yet), so it’s difficult to promote this film based on name recognition. Instead, it is the kind of film that draws you in with its promise of being an easygoing, compelling character study, a film about a deeply ordinary man without any endearing traits or aspirational qualities, simply trying to make his way through life without ruffling too many feathers or causing any unnecessary problems. The only issue is that his entire life has been plagued with awkward situations, and it is very likely that there isn’t a person in his life, whether a family member, friend or passing acquaintance, who has left a conversation with him feeling better than they did when they started. An entire film based around this premise and not much else would be torturous had it not been helmed by someone who has effectively weaponised this kind of off-kilter awkwardness as a powerful narrative tool, something that can easily sit at the heart of a film such as this and make it deeply effective in unexpected ways. Anchored by one of the year’s most poignant and heartfelt performances from the always fantastic Krumholtz, who commits wholeheartedly to playing this complex character, and driven by a strange but entrancing sense of humour, Lousy Carter is an immensely entertaining film with a lot of heart and soul and a lot of terrific ideas that keep it from being entirely cynical. It’s a fascinating deconstruction of masculinity and the intellectual elite, delivered in the form of a scathing but oddly quite moving character study made by one of the great independent filmmakers of his generation.