There’s a point every summer when just about any of us could use a dose of ridiculousness. It might hit right as the kids return from camp—or as you’re counting the days until they go. Hottest day of the year? A dumb, breezy comedy is just the thing. Bad day at work? Maybe Jon Hamm in a bathrobe is calling your name.
In the absurd-comedy department you could do much worse than Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, in which Zoey Deutch plays the Gail of the title, a bright-eyed, button-nosed small-town Kansas hairdresser engaged to her bland but seemingly devoted high school sweetheart, Tom (Michael Cassidy). With the wedding just a few weeks away, Gail offhandedly introduces Tom to the concept of the celebrity pass, in which each person in a committed partnership is allowed to have sex with one famous person of his or her choice, identified in advance. Tom isn’t sure he’s got a celebrity crush—Tilda Swinton is floated as a possibility—but it turns out he finds a candidate pretty fast. (To reveal who it is would spoil one of the movie’s many silly pleasures.)
Crestfallen, Gail heads to Los Angeles with her bestie coworker Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley) for a hairdressers’ conference. But her real aim is to solve her romantic befuddlement by sleeping with her celebrity crush, who happens to be Jon Hamm. How to find him? The guy selling star maps on Hollywood Boulevard knows how to locate the homes of Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon—forget that both died years ago— but has no idea where Hamm might reside. He does give them a suggestion, though, that leads them to an ambitious aspiring agent at Creative Artists Agency, Ben Wang’s Caleb. Caleb has no idea how to find Hamm either, though he does lead them to someone who might prove useful, Hamm’s Mad Men co-star John Slattery, who now whiles away his days of underemployment in his garage, working out his aggressions by punching a forlorn-looking mannequin. The gang is rounded out by world-weary paparazzo Vincent (Ken Marino), who has never been able to snap a picture of Hamm—he considers the actor his white whale.
Any resemblance to The Wizard of Oz, including Gail’s wardrobe of snazzy red shoes, is purely un-coincidental. Gail Daughtry was directed and cowritten by David Wain, a veteran of the comedy troupe The State and also the director of the 2001 cult hit Wet Hot American Summer; Marino, another State and Wet Hot alumnus, is his cowriter. The gags here are loose-limbed and knock-kneed, and there are lots of them: if one doesn’t quite land, you needn’t worry—another will be coming along soon. Some jokes, including a riff on the history of the Wright Brothers, feel vaguely Dada, as if Marino and Wain had spent a long, happy stretch of aimless days drinking coffee and free-associating. And there’s lots of mild raunchiness here, including an over-the-top sex scene rendered in dreamy-silly soft-focus. (Here’s where Hamm and his bathrobe come in.) The whole enterprise glows with friendly, pleasing daffiness.
Best of all is Deutch’s Gail, whose sunbeam demeanor barely conceals her flirty, mischievous side. Gail believes that once she’s achieved her goal of seducing Hamm, she’ll be ready to settle down with Tom. Fat chance. Deutch was marvelous as Jean Seberg in last year’s Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater’s sprightly film about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s New Wave classic Breathless. Here, she shows a knack for goodnatured, slightly off-color silliness. In the film’s early moments, Gail cheerfully explains to Otto why she and her dud boyfriend Tom were made for each other: “I finally got him to buy the cow after giving him the milk for free.” Even in her exaggerated innocence, there’s something delightfully unhinged about her. Any old schmuck can buy a cow. What Gail’s kooky erotic odyssey teaches her is that no one can fence her in.
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