Available on DVD: “Cedar Rapids”

Isiah Whitlock Jr., John C. Reilly, Anne Heche and Ed Helms
 in Cedar Rapids

Everything’s up to date in Cedar Rapids, which not only has skyscrapers, but also a hotel with a pool sparkling in the atrium like a blue diamond. For Tim Lippe (rhymes with yippee), the 34-year-old naïf at the center of this wistful, equally tender and raunchy comedy of self-discovery, also called Cedar Rapids, the hotel and the pool signal that he’s reached the big time. What he can’t yet know is that by entering the hotel, having guilelessly said no to the friendly neighborhood prostitute outside, he has crossed a Rubicon. He’s on his way to a moral awakening in a story laced with Oedipal overtones and giddy with longing and smut.

Played by a gravely comic Ed Helms (another Daily Show alum), Tim has traveled a great distance, psychologically if not geographically, to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, from the fictional town of Brown Valley, Wis. An insurance salesman, he has been sent to an annual convention to represent the tiny company that serves as the family he doesn’t have. Left fatherless as a boy, motherless as an adolescent, he has looked to his boss, Bill (the terrific character actor Stephen Root), for paternal guidance and to his seventh-grade teacher, Macy (Sigourney Weaver, perfect), for something more than maternal comfort. He’s so deeply tucked into the bosom of familiarity, so insular and unworldly, that he’s never been on a plane.

He ends up taking his first flight, straight to Cedar Rapids, blissing out the whole way. He’s tickled that he has to go through the usual safety gantlet at the airport: “It’s me,” he says to his friend working security, who treats him as gravely as any potential terrorist threat. Part of what’s satisfying about Cedar Rapids, which was directed by Miguel Arteta (“The Good Girl”) from a smart, generous script by Phil Johnston, is that it takes both Tim and his joy seriously, and without self-congratulatory winks and nudges. Tim is funny, with his Ken-doll hair and sweater vests, wide-eyed wonder and fear (“There’s an Afro-American man standing in my room,” he says with dismay on meeting a suitemate), but he only looks like a punch line.

The filmmakers do invite gentle laughter with this innocent who enters uncharted territory as if risking oblivion, though more as comic bait than for cruel sport. Tim carries a money belt strapped to his stomach, as if he were braving the wilds of New York, and thinks the hotel clerk who asks for a credit card (for incidentals) might be part of a con. His worries are tempered after settling into his suite, where he’s soon caught between different, oppositional forces: his black suitemate, Ronald Wilkes (Isiah Whitlock Jr., deadpan and very fine), a man of reason and Apollonian sobriety; and a third member of this unlikely party, Dean Ziegler, a Dionysian figure played with vulgar gusto and at a suitably loud volume by John C. Reilly.

Together, though at different avuncular registers, Ronald and Dean help initiate Tim into convention rituals, including bleary nights at the bar, flirtations and official and unofficial team building. They’re there when he has his first drink (a sip of cream sherry) and when he meets Joan Ostrowski-Fox (a poignant Anne Heche), a melancholy party girl. Though he tries to keep his eyes on the prize, notably a hunk of glass called the Two Diamonds award that he’s meant to bring back to Brown Valley, Tim sways, bends and nearly breaks. Inside this hotel, with its chlorine perfume (“It’s like I’m in Barbados,” he enthuses), Tim, in friendship and with love, loses and then finds himself.

As he moves away from his surrogate mother (if panic-dialing her often) and contends with a patriarchal problem (the plot thickens, slightly), Tim travels a classic path of enlightenment that runs parallel with our own understanding of him. It’s a modest journey of a modest man that Arteta smartly doesn’t inflate in a movie that clocks in at a fast 87 minutes. In his characteristic unassuming fashion he gives the actors room to play, even as he keeps the mood as intimate as his filmmaking. And while Arteta likes a dirty joke as much as the next comic director, because those laughs burble up from characters whose raucousness comes from an honest grappling with life’s absurdities, the jokes sing as well as zing.

Not long after Tim arrives in Cedar Rapids, he and Joan take a walk in a park and then sit on swings like children. Tim talks about his father’s death (you see the mournful boy still in him) and also about how the river in front of them once flooded, and how in each case it was insurance agents who saved the day. Joan, joking, calls him Insurance Man, a kind of superhero. But Tim isn’t super anything (though he proves heroic), and what makes Cedar Rapids a low-wattage pleasure is its insistence that his ordinariness — with his decency and sense of wonder — is pretty extraordinary. Later, when Tim returns to the swing set, he’s choked up and alone, but it’s a fleeting setback for a man now very much in the world.