‘Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass’ Review: David Wain’s Antically Funny Satire of High-Concept Movies

In the movie that put him on the map, the great “Wet Hot American Summer” (2001), David Wain spoofed all those cheesy grade-Z summer-camp exploitation comedies from the 1980s, and the beauty of the movie was that it recreated what it was parodying with such derisive glee that it came close to being the thing itself. “Wet Hot American Summer” was awesomely smart about being awesomely dumb. Wain’s new movie, “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass,” is a very different sort of comedy (and it’s not on the level of that droll classic), but it, too, is driven by a trash-in-quotation-marks double vision.

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On paper, it sounds like a bawdy rom-com romp. Gail Daughtry (Zoey Deutch), a wholesome hairdresser in Wilbur, Kansas, is about to marry her former high-school-football-star sweetheart (Michael Cassidy). The two are devoted to each other, but like many couples, they have a deal that gives them a celebrity sex pass: If the opportunity ever arises, each of them is allowed to sleep with one famous person of their choice. Suffice to say that Gail finds herself on a weekend jaunt to L.A. in pursuit of hers: Jon Hamm.

In other hands, this could have been a plausible romantic comedy — a riff on love and sex and celebrity and fantasy and where all of them intertwine. But David Wain, who in 2014 made a scathing parody of rom-coms called “They Came Together,” has no interest in directing a “believable” comedy. From its opening moments, in which a small-town mailman (the always delectable Fred Melamed) narrates the story we’re watching with a note of unhinged hostility, “Gail Daughtry” has a tone that’s broad, antic, overemphatic, and a bit wacked. Everything in it is stylized and exaggerated, from the personality of Gail herself — Deutch plays her in a perky bob haircut and with a beaming smile, like a Sandra Dee character from the early ’60s — to the incident that sets off her L.A. trip: Gail and her fiancée attend a Jennifer Aniston book signing, and one hour later she finds him in the backroom of the bookstore…having sex with Jennier Aniston. (It’s at this point we realize that this is not a comedy set in the real world.) Gail must now attempt to sleep with Jon Hamm to even the score.

She travels to L.A. on the coattails of her hair-salon colleague, Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), who is heading there to attend a hairstyling convention — and who is, of course, the Witty Gay Best Friend, though that’s just one of countless ways that the film uses clichés in an italicized “Look, it’s a cliché!” way. “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass” is a high-concept movie that’s a parody of high-concept movies. It’s a fish-out-of-water comedy (innocent girl from the Midwest in big bad Los Angeles) stitched together out of synthetic gambits, except the fact that it’s so synthetic is part of the joke.

The movie presents us with a vision of L.A. that seems almost deliberately frozen in time, very late-’90s/early 2000s, which is why it can mock the tropes it keeps trotting out, like the friendly dude with a screw loose (Michael Ian Black) standing on Hollywood Boulevard handing out maps to the stars’ homes, and his obsession with CAA as the center of the entertainment universe. Gail and Otto find an agent-in-training there, Caleb (the quick-tongued Ben Wang), who gets fired after trying to get them Jon Hamm’s home address. With nowhere to go, Caleb joins forces with Gail and Otto, and this is where the movie starts to winkingly mirror “The Wizard of Oz,” as the innocent Gail (the Dorothy Gale character) gathers a posse of friendly knights to help her in pursuit of the Wizard-like mystery presence of Jon Hamm. She’ll need all the help she can get, since at the airport she accidentally exchanged suitcases with two gangsters (hers now contains a plan to destroy the world), one of whom is pursuing her with a mission to kill.  

I’ve actually left out the essence of the movie, which is that it’s jam-packed with gags that run the gamut from naughty to corny to crackpot insane, the whole thing laced with David Wain’s flaky surreal dunked-in-media sensibility. “Gail Daughtry,” while tied to a recognizable plot, is so aggressive in its meta absurdity that it makes an episode of “Seinfeld” look like Ingmar Bergman.

The tone is somewhere between ZAZ and a ZAZ film played semi-straight, as the movie zigzags from a cab driver (Richard Kind) nattering on about the greatness of Elizabeth Perkins to a hotel clerk who recommends that they visit such fabled L.A. hotspots as McDonald’s, Starbucks and a Foot Locker where one of the employees will give you a blowjob out back by the dumpster; from the mobsters (Joe Lo Truglio and Mather Zickel) who are so dense they can’t figure out Gail’s location while staring at a photograph of her standing right in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre to the crazed cameo by Weird Al, playing himself as a frenzied gun nut, to the Jon Hamm personal assistant (Tobie Windham) who warns that if they don’t stay away from his apartment at the Chateau Marmont, “I’ll make you real sick!”

Then there’s the comedy gift that keeps on giving that is John Slattery. Hamm’s “Mad Men” co-star portrays himself in the movie, and at first we think it’s just another throwaway cameo, in this case taking off from the fact that Slattery, as one character puts it, “hasn’t had an acting job in over a decade.” But Slattery joins up with Gail’s “Wizard of Oz” team, and the actor goes on a trajectory of deranged triumph, starting off as a loser whose unreturned texts to Jon Hamm date back to 2017, but then he winds up turning into the ultimate ironic action hero. The other most amusing character is Vincent (played by Wain’s longtime screenwriter collaborator, Ken Marino), a fallen paparazzi with a hilariously belabored tragic backstory.

“Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass” is a flagrant concoction that wants to do nothing more than make you laugh, and at that it succeeds. Yet in its way, there’s a bit of a vision to it. It’s a satire of Hollyweird rooted in a nostalgic affection for an idea of that place that barely even exists anymore. When Gail finally does hook up with Jon Hamm, he’s the man behind the curtain — a doofy dreamboat who’s only pretending to be Jon Hamm. The whole movie is pretending to be something it’s not. It’s a smartened up homage to dumbing down.