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Napoleon might have been doomed to spend the rest of his high school career alone with these people, mistaking his isolation for individuality and his lack of talent for artistic integrity. But he secretly has a crush on the only person in school as hopelessly awkward as he is, a girl named Deb (Tina Majorino) who looks like Frances McDormand's niece, is a comically inept freelance photographer, sells hideous homemade costume jewelry door to door and gets her hair done by a toddler. She's not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but at least she's ambitious. And Napoleon is too chicken to make a move.

Enter Pedro (Efren Ramirez), an Hispanic exchange student every bit as listless yet perhaps 30% more intelligent than anyone else in the school. He strikes up an unenthusiastic friendship with Napoleon more or less entirely by chance, and immediately sets his sights on Deb. Pedro doesn't say a lot, but he seems to know exactly what he wants. His arrival shakes things up a bit, inspiring Napoleon to make his own attempt at romance, which is something that takes the words "gawky" and "depressing" to a whole new level.

Eventually, Grandma breaks her tailbone riding a dune buggy, for some reason. This requires Napoleon's Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) to move in and care for him and Kip while she recuperates. Rico is a little like Al Bundy if he'd decided to live out of a conversion van instead of getting married, and sell Tupperware instead of shoes. He's well into his 40s, and blames his lifetime of total failure on the fact that his high school football career never panned out. He spends his free time eating microwave flank steak and making videos of himself throwing the football. He's is an inspiration to every lanky, unambitious, rural kid who grew up without parents or goals.

But like the others, Rico's incompetence is still somehow intimidating to Napoleon, who finds himself surrounded by people whose lives seem to be full of activity, despite their overall uselessness to the rest of humanity. It compels Napoleon to fill his life with a bunch of pointless exertion, but with no apparent goals or overall relevance to say, the plot of the movie. What makes it worse is that losers usually have the benefit of other losers to commiserate with, to drink cheap beer with, and to shake their fist at the fickle fates with. All these people seem to have is each other, which is about all four starving men on a lifeboat can say.

In addition to being light on plot, Napoleon Dynamite has the same relentlessly smug attitude toward rural America that you find in films like Raising Arizona or Talladega Nights, but without the humor and/or charm. Stereotyping isn't fair but it happens for a reason, and it should be a lazy easy place to find a laugh. So the bigger question, when you see it in this movie, would be "why should I laugh?". Napoleon Dynamite relies on a strange sort of reverse-ironic humor that's supposed to be funny because of the delivery, not the context.

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