Sometimes a movie just needs to be funny. There are no embedded sociopolitical critiques or deeper meanings hidden among the jokes—and there are myriad; nearly every line is either a setup to a bit or a response to it—in Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, the latest absurdist comedy from David Wain.
Wain is a hit-or-miss auteur who has directed seven comedies of a similar gag-filled nature, with his debut, the cult classic Wet Hot American Summer, almost universally acknowledged as his gold standard. But Gail Daughtry (opening Thursday in South Florida theaters) may be his most effective knee-slapper since 2007’s underrated The Ten. And as a ribald, laugh-out-loud caper, it’s a unicorn in today’s multiplexes, where comedies have all but disappeared, left behind amid the trendier contrails of liminal horror, franchise blockbusters, and zeitgeist-chasing epics.
There’s no zeitgeist present in Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, which, if anything, conjures the Los Angeles of a bygone era, the sort of Kodachrome, deliberately artificial fantasyland to which Naomi Watts’ small-town ingenue, Betty, descends on the escalator in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. The title character in Gail Daughtry, a hair stylist played by Zoey Deutsch, similarly lands in Hollywood from a small town, this one in Kansas (yes, there’s a Wizard of Oz joke in Wain and co-writer Ken Marino’s script, and it works).
Her trip to the City of Angels, ostensibly to attend a beauty convention with her sassy co-worker Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), is actually a revenge quest of sorts. Her fiancée and high school sweetheart Tom (Michael Cassidy) has just redeemed his own “celebrity sex pass” by meeting and bedding Jennifer Aniston in the back of a bookstore, following the latter’s public reading from her cookbook. So Gail, on the advice of a storefront psychic, determines that the only way to save her marriage is to find and coerce her own celebrity sex pass, Jon Hamm, into the sheets.
For a film that’s actually “about” very little, Gail Daughtry abounds in plot, introducing a nemesis, played with deft comic timing by Sabrina Impacciatore, intent on stealing government secrets and, in her own words, “disrupting the global financial system.” There’s some important business involving the Hitchcockian switcheroo of Gail’s hardbound suitcase with an identical case, and gangsters—olive-toned types straight of The Sopranos’ central casting, who, in a great recurring bit, don’t speak a word of Italian—who must retrieve the case and kill Gail. Along the way, Gail assembles a ragtag crew of misfits to assist in her rendezvous with Hamm, including a meek wannabe agent from Creative Artists Agency; a paparazzo who considers Hamm his personal “great white whale,” the celeb who got away; and the character actor John Slattery, who co-starred with Hamm on Mad Men, and who gamely portrays an out-of-work version of himself.
And, as befits a caricatured vision of Hollywood, celebrities appear in droves, most of whom have starred in other projects in the Wain universe, from Paul Rudd to Elizabeth Banks. Penn Jillette is cast as the silent partner alongside “Weird Al” Yankovic, and is appropriately never given a line. If you appreciate why this casting decision is so funny, this is the comedy for you.
But it won’t be for everyone. If you desire a modicum of logic or sensible behavior or realistic dialogue, you’ll still be fumbling for these intangibles after the credits have rolled. “Everyone is such a character in this town,” Gail comments, after their cab driver (Richard Kind) expresses his obsession with the actor Elizabeth Perkins, and then requests a mid-drive rest to recharge his batteries.
It’s all ridiculous, but knowingly so. Wain is an ironic reveler in cliches, delivering riff after riff with a wink and a nod to the most hackneyed of story mechanics, from the heroes always prepared with a quippy rejoinder to the bad guys spending way, way too many beats laughing maniacally in each other’s faces.
These bits work because too many movies still indulge in these trite chestnuts with a straight face, absent Wain’s postmodern quotation marks. And so his best audiences will always be ones well-versed in Hollywood cinema at its clunkiest and most sentimental (guilty as charged). For me, this film’s best antecedent is 1997’s The Wrong Guy, a criminally underseen vehicle for Dave Foley as a businessman—nodding again to Hitchcock—wrongly pursued for a murder, who finds himself at the center of a madcap conspiracy that is more anachronistically eccentric than commercially zany. Time will tell whether Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass will be just as memorable in 30 years. But right now, in 2026, it’s just about the funniest thing I’ve seen all year.
Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass opens Thursday, July 9 at AMC Pompano Beach 18, Regal Magnolia Place in Coral Springs, and other area theaters.
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