"Somebody had stolen his yeast, and he had gone totally apeshit," reads one of the opening lines in Yeast Lords, an epic sci-fi novel by teenager Benjamin Purvis. Benjamin (Michael Angarano) is a nerdy kid who lives with his mom (Jennifer Coolidge) in a geodesic dome somewhere in semi-rural Utah; as his mom sews tacky gowns out of beach towels and burlap and eats popcorn like it's cold cereal, Benjamin retreats to his hand-written sci-fi stories about a hero named Bronco who gets his gonads stolen by mad scientists and rides rocket-powered robot deer called "battle stags." (In the fairly amazing sequences when we get to see Yeast Lords enacted, Bronco is played by the great Sam Rockwell; nobody can shout "You took my 'nads!" quite like him.) When Benjamin attends a teen writers' camp called Cletus Fest, he gets to meet his hero: sci-fi author Ronald Chevalier (brilliantly played by Flight of the Conchord's Jemaine Clement). Chevalier is the creator of pulp tales like Brain Cream and Troll Hole, and he promptly steals Benjamin's story. What results is a frequently funny, frequently awkward, and frequently uneven comedy; as in their previous films, Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre, the married creative team of Jared Hess (writer/director) and Jerusha Hess (writer) constantly teeters on the edge of sympathizing with and mocking their characters. by Erik Henriksen