Starring Melissa Rauch. Rated 18A

The Big Bang Theory’s Melissa Rauch, who wrote this with husband Winston Rauch, plays someone deliriously unlikable. Her Hope Anabelle Greggory won the titular third for gymnastics at Rome’s 2004 Olympics, and her main claim to fame—doing it on a sprained ankle—is also why her career never went any further.

Instead of being America’s Sweetheart, she’s become the angry girlfriend of tiny Amherst, Ohio, where this was actually filmed. When not sleeping it off in the basement of her postman dad’s suburban bungalow (with Veep’s Gary Cole in the Bob Balaban role), she wanders around town in an American-flag tracksuit. This Tonya Harding with dead-mother issues basically lives on the frayed goodwill and free stuff of her rust-belt neighbours.

Judging from the amount of booze and junk food she consumes, and the number of folks she cheerfully pisses off, Greggory could have been played by Melissa McCarthy. But Rauch, saddling herself with peroxide bangs and a flat Midwestern twang, makes this learning-impervious Valkyrie burn calories through sheer animosity. Currently, she’s feeling threatened by the unexpected rise of another local gymnast with Olympic potential. And when people start pushing her to coach young Maggie (Haley Lu Richardson), an easily corrupted Christian goodie girl, it throws her right off the ol’ horse.

Produced by the Duplass brothers and directed by commercial vet Bryan Buckley, the movie’s funnier than it has any right to be, given the crudity of its running jokes. But The Bronze becomes more interesting when it quiets down for Greggory’s burgeoning friendship with a goofy gym owner played by Silicon Valley’s Thomas Middleditch. The yuks (and yucks) come back whenever she runs into a sports-world nemesis called Lance (Captain America’s Sebastian Stan), leading to the least gratuitous sex scene you’ll see this year. Let’s just say they stick the landing.