Observe and Report is a movie about failure and disappointment, compulsion and mental illness, violence and sexual obsession. It’s a dark, weird portrait of middle-American angst and shattered dreams. It’s grim, it’s deranged, it’s unsettling. It’s also a side-splittingly funny comedy.

The movie opens in the halls of the Forest Ridge shopping mall, an unmemorable retail cluster somewhere in the middle of America. Shot in a mix of slow and fast motion, the rhythms of the center slowly present themselves: Store employees open up the gates, shoppers come and go, purchases are made. It’s banal but seems harmless.

Watching over it all is Ronnie Barnhardt (Seth Rogen), the mall’s senior security officer. Ronnie lives at home with his alcoholic mother and wears an ill-fitting sweat suit whenever he’s not at work. He’s overweight, socially awkward, madly in lust with a pretty make-up-counter girl named Brandi (Anna Faris), and prone to violent acting out (training a new guard, he pushes aggressive — nearly sadistic — Taser use). He’s often mean-spirited, reacting defensively to condescension with the retort, “If anything, I laugh at other idiots trying to do what they want!” He doesn’t have much power in the world, but what little he has he exercises to its absolute limit, harassing shopkeepers he doesn’t like and exploiting Brandi’s fear of a parking-lot flasher to get her to agree to go on a date with him. He’s the Bad Lieutenant of the of mall cops.

To put it bluntly, he’s a loser, and not necessarily a lovable one. Indeed, exactly how much to sympathize with Ronnie is an open question, one the film never clearly answers. Rogen, in what may be his most brilliant performance, makes him seem at once threatening and harmless, both an innocent corrupted by the ugly consumer ethos of his cage-like surroundings and a violent, mentally unstable creature nursing and feeding on the resentments that come with a lifetime of failure and ridicule.

The implicit question throughout the film is how Ronnie came to be so disturbed. A number of possibilities suggest themselves: a broken home with dysfunctional parents, bipolar disorder, bullying and rejection by those around him. But the film also implies that perhaps the mall itself, and the culture of coarse mass consumption it represents, is to blame. The tasteless, tacky ways it represents may not be so harmless after all.

The almost universally off-putting supporting cast, nearly all of whom are creatures of the mall, seems to suggest as much. As Brandi, Faris is pure shrew — stupid, vain, and self-obsessed. Ray Liotta shows up as Detective Harrison, a sneering city cop assigned to investigate the flasher. As Ronnie’s soft-spoken second-in-command, Michael Peña delivers some of the biggest laughs and, late in the movie, what may be its most unexpected turn. Lesser characters are, if anything, even creepier: a cruel and dictatorial fast-food manager, a skin-cream salesman named Saddam who may or may not have a thing for young girls. The assorted nut-jobs and wackos are all funny, sometimes riotously so, but they’re not exactly likable. There’s precious little to warm to here: The sole pleasant character is a food-court employee named Nell (Collette Wolfe) who serves up friendly conversation and free coffee every time Ronnie stops by.

It’s an outrageous all-American freakshow, but of a different kind than we’re used to seeing on the big screen. Rather than condescending to its distinctly unhip subjects, the movie seems strangely drawn to its panoply of weirdos. Much credit is due to director Jody Hill, who infuses the film with a distinctly un-Hollywood sense of American ordinariness, which he presents as alternately bizarre, tragic, and hilarious. A graduate of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Hill’s vision suggests intimacy with the oddities of middle America, which he’s set out to explore. He seems simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by the diversity of disorder in suburban life, and he catalogs it with a determined sociological rigor.

Indeed, the humiliation to which he subjects his characters seems methodological, particularly with Ronnie. There’s not much plot to the movie; it’s organized instead around questions about Ronnie’s mental and emotional fortitude: How much misery can this poor schlub take? And how will he react when he finally reaches his breaking point?

Hill pokes and prods, with results that are both shocking and unexpected. In a surprisingly disquieting scene, Ronnie, having been prodded into applying to join the police force, finds out from Detective Harrison that he flunked the psychological exam. One of Harrison’s fellow officers hides in a nearby room; we are led to believe he is waiting to pull some sort of a prank of Ronnie. But instead, as Ronnie begins to pathetically protest, the cop simply exits, prank unplayed. “I thought this was going to be funny. But it’s actually kind of sad,” he says. The set-up suggests a joke is on the way, but instead, the payoff forces the viewer into an unpleasant confrontation with the miserable reality of the situation. That’s more or less the way Observe and Report goes. There are plenty of knockout jokes, but in the end, the cop is right: It’s actually kind of sad.

– Peter Suderman blogs at The American Scene.