Starring Kyle Mooney. Rated PG

Saturday Night Live’s Kyle Mooney wrote this bit of thin whimsy with lifelong pal Kevin Costello, and their basic concept is pretty nifty. At age 32, Mooney plays 25-year-old James Pope, kidnapped as an infant and raised in a Utah desert bunker by his abductors (Mark “Not Actually Your Father” Hamill and Jane “Bearly There” Adams).

The shaggy-haired lad has only been exposed to one form of (what he thinks is) popular culture: a long-running series following the quasi-educational exploits of someone in a giant ursine head. When finally transported back to that other fallout shelter known as suburbia, he discovers that the titular show was created specifically for him.

The movie’s start exhibits the most charm, in a Michel Gondry kind of way, with VHS clips of the Brigsby Bear series. But even that wacky French stylist had trouble sustaining his ideas over more convoluted efforts like The Science of Sleep and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—which likewise examined the fate of innocents navigating pitiless reality.

With pedestrian direction provided by SNL veteran Dave McCary, Mooney and company drop the ball just when they decide to ground James in the world he left behind. Someone must have called the FBI and the local sheriff’s department, but their military-level response includes neither a social-services counsellor (despite one briefly played by Claire Danes) nor the detective who knows the most about the case (cast standout Greg Kinnear), leaving our man-child understandably traumatized.

Later, Michaela Watkins and Matt Walsh try to convince as parents robbed of their first-born, while Ryan Simpkins is perhaps too believable as a teen sister who barely registers his return. There’s some yadda-yadda about fractured families, but all are pretty much content to simply let James—who exhibits almost no curiosity about them or what he has missed—go about his business.

Instead of horndogging around or plowing through the local library, he focuses obsessively on continuing the instrument of his brainwashing by making a lo-fi, full-length feature spinoff of the Brigsby series. Since the script never suggests what its creators meant to make of James’s undernourished brain in the first place, his efforts don’t carry much philosophical weight. But they do take up a lot of the movie’s dragged-out 100 minutes, most of which manage to be neither funny nor profound. After several months in “civilization”, our modern-day Kaspar Hauser still hasn’t figured out how to use money; that he hasn’t had to is the most meaningful thing here. It’s evidence of the sort of comfortable materialism that allows well-meaning, moderately amusing people to dream up funky twists on society without actually understanding anything about it.