In Zero Charisma – the Nerdist-distributed, crowd-funded flick released this week through video-on-demand – a young man named Scott (Sam Eidson) rules the roost as dungeon master of his own long-running game of pseudo-D&D. He's condescending to his fellow players when he feels they don't understand his mastery of the game. When a hip guy named Miles (Garrett Graham) with a popular blog – GeekChic.com – joins the game and becomes a beloved member of the group, Scott feels threatened, and worries that the cool new interloper will usurp his role as ringleader and beat him at his own game. It's a conflict that points to a larger and more contentious debate within many geeky subcultures: What is a real nerd?
Last month, io9's Rob Bricken posted a new trailer for Zero Charisma with the headline, "The Nerdist's Zero Charisma movie may not be doing nerds any favors." In the process of making a geeky, RPG-playing guy its protagonist, Bricken suggested, the film may have also reduced him to a stereotype: the overweight, anti-social tabletop gamer who still lives at home. "I can't shake the feeling that most people who watch the movie will be laughing at nerds, not with nerds." As a film that's trying to serve two masters – the tabletop gaming fans who the film is ostensibly about and a more mainstream audience – it might be more accurate to say that it does a little bit of both.
"[We] wanted to make a movie for a general audience that felt authentic to the subculture but could be appreciated by anybody," the film's writer and co-director Andrew Matthews told WIRED. A Dungeons & Dragons player since junior high, Matthews wanted Zero Charisma to depict how gamer life has changed as geek culture has become more mainstream. "These hobbies that used to require so much commitment and sacrifices to pursue are now so much easier. That's not necessarily a bad thing. The more people that are playing, the more players you can find. But for people like Scott – and myself on some level – it just kind of seems unfair. This is our world, our refuge that kind of belonged only to us. Once it goes mainstream it's not special anymore."
Decent but somewhat insecure (and a bit of a know-it-all), Scott's the kind of guy everyone has met, and perhaps even the kind of person we've all been at one point or another. Is he a stereotype? Eh, maybe. But no more so than most characters in television and movies are simplified versions of real-world people. If you look past Scott's black-T-shirt-wearing, metal-loving, socially-inept ways, he's a character that's relatable to almost anyone who has felt insecure about their place in life. While he struggles with losing his friends over to the uber-cool Miles, he's also dealing with his mother and stepfather coming back into his life – and trying take away the house he's been living in with his grandmother – while finding a way out of his dead-end job as a food delivery guy. Like anyone else, he's just trying to figure his life.
There's always been a love-hate with on-screen nerds – from Urkel to (almost) anyone Anthony Michael Hall played in the 1980s – and walking the line between accurately depicting a subculture and also making it accessible to the world outside of it has always been tricky. See: Why Community, a cult-favorite shows with geeky undertones, remains beloved while the tone-deaf hit Big Bang Theory catches flack. In Zero Charisma, a film that tries to split the difference, nerdy protagonist Scott couldn't be too polished or he'd look just like the interloping hipster who becomes his nemesis. But by setting him up in opposition to the "cool" nerd, some slightly stereotypical character traits (like Scott's smarter-than-thou attitude in the clip below) seep in.
Matthews and his co-director Katie Graham told Eidson not to model his performance of Scott after any prototypical nerd characters, but rather to go for John Bender's vibe in The Breakfast Club – a tough guy with some vulnerabilities. While *Breakfast Club'*s goth girl Allison gets a makeover and is theoretically "improved," both Bender and Scott stick to their guns about who they really are. "He changed about, like, one percent," Graham said. "That's more how people do in real life." While Scott gains a better understanding of himself by the end of the film, he doesn’t change his behavior much – ultimately, because he's fine just the way he is.
"If he stopped being Scott that that would've been so sad for us – we like his character," Matthews said. "When you're making an independent movie for no money, the one thing you get is you get to not make it like a mainstream Hollywood ending."
Zero Charisma, which won the narrative film Audience Award at this year's South By Southwest film festival, is being co-released by Tribeca Film, and begins its limited theater run in New York this weekend.
