Safety Not Guaranteed

Depending on what you thought the last great quirky indy film was, “Safety Not Guaranteed” might be the next great quirky indy film.

New director. No name cast. The East Village Saturday night crowd applauded, after laughing loud and often all night. Those of us in the older demo could identify with the plot and the vibe, even though nobody in the cast seems to be much older than 35.

These are all good signs. Speaking of signs, the recent movie that this one most strongly resembles is “Jeff Who Lives at Home,” and one area of overlap is Mark Duplass, one of the two writer-director brothers who made “Jeff.” In “Safety,” he acts, and he has by far the toughest assignment as Kenneth, a loner in a Washington coast beach town. Kenneth is either a crackpot or a genius or both. He’s either a lovelorn poet or a psycho-stalker or both. For the movie to work, Duplass has to keep all those possibilities alive. His glances have to convey both gentleness and paranoia. Duplass does this through underplaying and nuance.

“Safety” is a much more entertaining movie than “Jeff” although each is the story of a guy nursing a “Twilight Zone” fantasy that might or might not be true. The difference is p.o.v. In “Jeff,”  the oddball is our lens. In “Safety” we watch the oddball through the eyes of three soi-disant journalists up from Seattle to work on a quirky magazine feature about a guy secretly working on a time travel device.

The movie works off sharp performances by Aubrey Plaza (queen of the low-affect, both here and in “Parks and Rec”) and Jake M. Johnson (imagine a slightly snaky Mark Ruffalo). Plaza is Darius, a massively depressed magazine intern who gets the assignment — a la Jean Arthur in “Mr Deeds” — of slipping inside the walls of Kenneth, the guy claiming to know the frequency for time travel. Johnson is Jeff, a feature writer being slowly eaten up by the sense that at 35 or so, his best days are way behind him.

No need to say more. The movie should be a small summer hit if it gets wide distribution. I’ll keep my eye out for other stuff by writer-director Colin Trevorrow.