Starring Michael Angarano and Jemaine Clement. Rated PG. Opens Friday, November 13, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

The latest direct-to-cult effort from Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre writer-director Jared Hess (coscripting with his wife, Jerusha Hess) brings us back to the seemingly inescapable metaphor of high school. This time, the seething outsider is Benjamin (Michael Angarano), a Utah teen whose sole escape is into the bizarre science-fiction stories he writes, in part, to glorify his dead father by transforming him into the heroically hirsute Bronco, played in Ed Wood–worthy visualizations by Sam Rockwell.

It can be no mistake that Rockwell resembles an older version of Angarano, and the Oedipal theme is repeated subtly (now there's an unusual word for this movie) when the kid attends a fantasy-writers workshop and meets Tabitha (Halley Feiffer). She's a more aggressive version of Benjamin's single mom (Jennifer Coollidge), who makes popcorn balls and hippie clothes when she's not sobbing into the nearest mirror.

At that convention, Ben also encounters his hero, Ronald Chevalier, a science-fiction giant (played by Flight of the Conchords' Jemaine Clement) who steals the movie as well as Benjie's manuscript. He turns it into a bestseller with an oddly effeminate hero (Rockwell again), while Tabitha and her DIY filmmaking buddy (Hess regular Héctor Jiménez) are busy shooting their own cheap-jack version of the Bronco saga.

Hess and company throw anything they can conjure at the screen, and perhaps too much of that involves bodily fluids and/or 1980s power ballads. This heavily mannered, garishly adolescent movie is not for everyone. But not everyone can, or should, have mammary cannons capable of penetrating the crusts of faraway planets.