‘All this randomness is leading somewhere,” insists the slovenly slacker referred to in the title of Jay and Mark Duplass’ mumblecore-inflected comedy “Jeff, Who Lives at Home.’’
Where it’s all leading is not apparent for most of this meandering movie’s first hour, which generates quite a few laughs on the way to a surprisingly satisfying climax.
For Jeff (Jason Segel) — a pot-smoking fan of the movie “Signs’’ who thinks a wrong-number call from someone named Kevin is some kind of, you know, sign — it’s an effort to leave his home for a trip to Home Depot.
And he does that only because his fed-up mom (Susan Sarandon), whose home provides the Baton Rouge basement where her indolent son sleeps, inconveniently demands that he repair a broken door slat for her birthday.
This errand is insufficient to prevent Jeff from chasing his Kevin-oriented destiny, the pursuit of which produces a chance encounter with his estranged older brother Pat (Ed Helms).
Pat is married, far more assertive (to the point of rage) and holds down a job at a paint store. But in his own way he is only marginally more responsible than his sibling.
The Hooters-loving Pat can’t understand why his wife, Linda (Judy Greer of “The Descendants”), has walked out in exasperation after he has bought a new Porsche they can’t afford. After all, he’s assured her the vehicle will add “excitement’’ to their flat-lining marriage.
In the movie’s funniest sequence, the brothers ineptly try to spy on Linda during an afternoon romantic encounter with a co-worker.
Meanwhile the brothers’ widowed mom, desperately unhappy in her office job, starts getting flirty text messages from a “secret admirer’’ — who turns out to be a female co-worker (Rae Dawn Chong) in the next cubicle who’s eager to connect in person.
Where is this saga of man-boys and the unhappy women who love them going, anyway?
This isn’t at all apparent until all of the main characters find their destinies — maybe — while caught in a traffic jam on a bridge on the way to New Orleans.
“Jeff, Who Lives at Home’’ is a bit too shaggy to totally live up to the potential of its fine cast. But there are moments of comedy gold — especially as Segel, who went full-frontal for “Forgetting Sarah Marshall — endures endless humiliations as the title character.