Filled with intellectual pretensions and raging hormones, Nick Twisp (Cera) lives a dull life with his cougar mother, Estelle (Smart), and her truck-driving, loutish boyfriend, Jerry (Galifianakis). When Jerry sells a group of strapping young sailors a lemon Chevy Nova, they want revenge. In true heroic fashion, Jerry takes the family to hide out in a trailer park until the coast is clear. Nick is sorely out of place, thinking himself condemned to slum it with his barbaric family, until he meets Sheeni (newcomer Portia Doubleday), the precocious Ozu-loving dilettante in the nearby two-storey trailer. It’s love at first sight, further cemented when Sheeni plays him French crooners on vinyl.

But Nick’s romanticized vision is shattered when he discovers that Sheeni is dating Trent (Jonathan B. Wright), a sickeningly handsome fop in tennis shoes and a cream-coloured sweater. With the stakes raised, Nick goes to hilarious lengths to secure Sheeni’s love, including buying her a puppy named Albert (after Camus, of course) and even creating an alter ego for himself, François Dillinger. A chain-smoking Frenchman sporting a devil-may-care moustache, François gets Nick into disaster after disaster in his quest for Sheeni’s attention.