On DVD: "Get Him to the Greek"

The joint winners of the Judd Apatow Comedy Internship for 2010 would appear to be the writer-director Nicholas Stoller and the actor-comedian-gadabout Russell Brand. It was Stoller who, in the Apatow-produced Forgetting Sarah Marshall two years ago, launched Brand's movie career Stateside; or, rather, it was Brand, who - simply by being himself (or a loucher version thereof) in short, pithy spurts - stole off with that rather flabby, overlong film. Brand's addled rocker Aldous Snow is revived in Get Him to the Greek's sharp prologue, witnessing the critical and commercial disaster of his vaguely poverty-themed concept album "African Child": "the worst thing to happen to Africa since apartheid," according to one of the kinder reviews.

Add to that the termination of his relationship with fellow starlet Jackie Q (Rose Byrne, a long way from TV's Damages, and all the funnier for it), and it's little surprise the character is going off the rails - at exactly the moment junior record executive Aaron Green (Jonah Hill) is planning the rocker's big comeback extravaganza, lining up a live gig at the Greek Theater in L.A. to promote a re-release of his earlier material. The tricky part is getting him there from his London penthouse, via New York and Vegas - a problem when your charge is guided not by any keen business acumen, but his nose and his dick; sure enough, Snow's soon drifting, distracted by alcohol, drugs, and any and every stewardess and cocktail waitress he passes.

The centrality of control to this plot marks Get Him to the Greek as absolutely a product of the modern media environment: the narrative is founded upon all those record-industry legends about unruly talent, but Stoller also wants to take us inside boardroom meetings where executives discuss how many "units" they've shifted, and the random selection of celebrity cameos (Ricky Schroeder, Paul Krugman and Draco Malfoy - together at last) serves both to embellish this tallest of tales and somehow confirm its real-world legitimacy. Put simply, if Forgetting Sarah Marshall was a treat for those underlings who'd worked hard to get Apatow's career to the point where it was producing $100m hits, Get Him to the Greek risks appearing self-congratulatory, and no more than a platform for Brand to play out all those messianic rockstar fantasies he's inhabited over the past decade.

The film, certainly, is as enamoured of the comeback myth as its leading man sometimes seems to be of himself; the redemption of Aldous Snow - the individual who somehow manages to turn his life, and live sets, around at the last minute, the conjuror who pulls success from abject failure - meshes squarely with all those interviews Brand has been giving with regard to Katy Perry. Within the Apatovian universe, Greek is nothing too radical or challenging: its depiction of rock 'n' roll excess suggests little has changed since the 70s heyday of Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous (the singer again jumps off a roof into a swimming pool, cueing a symbolic rebirth), and when Snow finally trashes a hotel suite, it's to the distinctly AM-radio strains of "Come On Eileen". Aldous seeks a reconciliation with first his estranged father (Colm Meaney, oddly enough), then the mother of his child; Aaron, meanwhile, tries to stay true to the nurse he's left behind back home. With its broadly traditional values and travelogue framing, we could be watching Planes, Trains and Automobiles all over again, albeit with the central roles reversed: this time, it's the chubby one who needs a shot in the arm, and the wiry one with odd hair who (almost literally) provides it.

You probably wouldn't rent Greek for profound insights into the human condition (as I think you might get in some of Apatow's truer, more reflective writing), but the back-and-forth rhythms Brand and Hill demonstrated in their brief encounters in Sarah Marshall sustain Stoller's latest sketchy construction, even through a 20-minute sequence in which Aldous coaxes Aaron into loosening up long enough to secrete a baggie of cocaine about his behind. Oddly enough, this is the film's dynamic in a nutshell - or in Jonah Hill's underpants, which may be the less appealing of the two images. On a formal level, Greek could well do with tightening up: Stoller, like his mentor, is fond of long, unbroken sequences, and accordingly the running time pushes on towards two hours. Yet on a narrative level - and, again, this is a feature of Apatow's own work - Greek is appealingly relaxed on matters of sex, race and drugs.

"Why is it so tense in here?," Aldous wonders as he interrupts Aaron's frosty reconciliation with his suspicious sweetheart (Mad Men's Elisabeth Moss, one of the New American Comedy's more forthright heroines) and sets in motion yet another casual threesome, but there's equally no tension in Aaron's own conversations with his boss (Sean Combs, a real surprise) over the phrase "house nigger". The film knows the danger zones, and scoots good-naturedly through and around them; "if it's funny, it's funny" seems to be Stoller's guideline, and six or seven times out of ten, Get Him to the Greek is funny, which makes it an improvement on the four- or five-ish Sarah Marshall. That said, if anybody even thinks of downloading Aldous Snow's ghastly anthems - whether "African Child" or the more populist "The Clap" - or indeed any of Jackie Q's conspicuously terrible, scantily concealed odes to anal sex, I will be forced to track you down and shoot you.

Get Him to the Greek is available on DVD from Monday.