DOUBLE INTEGRITY

In documenting an overturned insurance-salesman convention, Cedar Rapids also quietly, almost imperceptibly, upends conventions of a different sort. Rookie attendee Tim Lippe (Ed Helms), generally tolerant but little-traveled, is startled to find a black man standing at the door of his hotel room, but recovers quickly upon learning they're roommates. Ron (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) explains to Ed that, due to the hotel being overbooked, he's offered to make room in their suite for another guest. Tim, seeing only two beds, asks where the hypothetical third will sleep. The couch, Ron explains, folds out into a bed. Helms so often plays the hen-pecked or the put-upon, and does it so well, that it's hard not to see Tim — astonishingly naive and square — ending up on the couch in a moment of humiliation and bottled-up anger.

He never does, though. And neither does Tim, the morning after presumably getting drunk for the first time (shot of choice: cream sherry); ignoring Ron's intimations that it would be a good idea for both of them to turn in at a reasonable hour, due to important presentations on the following day; and making out with a topless woman (Anne Heche) in the hotel pool, wake up in a hangover panic, entirely unprepared for his morning appointment. Tim's crises are deeper-seated than that. He's entirely ready to deliver his sit-down speech, but irked by the direction in which the meeting might be headed.

If Miguel Arteta's fifth comedy of discomfiture also does hit a lot of expected beats on the way to its happy ending, it's hugely refreshing to see a film about integrity that itself often refuses to take the easy way out. Ron gives off a nearly smug air of satisfaction after turning in a "fair to middling" performance at his one-on-one with the president of the professional organization that organizes the annual Cedar Rapids convention; John C. Reilly's Dean Ziegler, a hard-drinking veteran wannabe poonhound with a heart of gold, constantly tells horrifically profane jokes that are somehow also hopelessly stale. These are more than Midwestern grotesques, though. The script by Phil Johnston reveals their respective knee-jerk intolerances — Tim's possible racism, Dean's disappointment in his nephew's Down syndrome, not to mention his gay jokes, etc. — but shows them coming together, no sweat, when the occasion calls for it.