‘Is he here?” asks Claire (Lisa Kudrow), an exasperated surgeon, of her husband Richard (Jeff Daniels), whom she has installed in their Montauk summer home in the off-season in what seems to be his very last-ditch effort to write his second novel.
“He” is Captain Excellent (Ryan Reynolds), Richard’s imaginary friend since the eighth grade — a blond, buff superhero in tights who shares Claire’s exasperation with her husband’s refusal to grow up even as he moves past the middle of his life.
Clinging as tightly to Captain Excellent’s cape as Linus of “Peanuts” clung to his blanket, Richard is an overgrown baby who squanders hours at his typewriter fruitlessly trying to figure out a name for his protagonist for a book about a long-extinct chicken.
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But mostly his blockage manifests itself in familiar indie quirks — Richard decides the cottage’s furniture would look better in the yard and fashions a replacement for the sofa out of unsold copies of his first book, “The Renderer.”
Even with as inventive an actor as Daniels, I was about to write off “Paper Man” as another self-indulgent flick about an overgrown man-child. Then Richard impulsively decides to hire a baby sitter — even though he and Claire don’t have any children.
Fortunately for us, his baby sitter choice is Abby (Emma Stone), a local 17-year-old he meets while tooling around town on a children’s bicycle.
Like Richard, she’s a lost soul with her very own imaginary, suicide-obsessed friend (Kieran Culkin).
Though she has a loutish boyfriend, Abby is so lonely that she returns for subsequent “baby-sitting” sessions that briefly end when Richard gets a little too physically familiar with her.
Soon Richard and Abby are cooking together. He takes up origami — and even hosts a kegger for Abby’s friends.
Claire is none too happy about that, and even less happy when she discovers her husband and his (platonic) teen friend passed out together on the book couch.
This is the directing debut of screenwriters Michele and Kieran Mulroney, whose credits include an unproduced Justice League movie; they’re now working on a “Sherlock Holmes” sequel for Robert Downey Jr.
“Paper Man” is far from perfect, but it holds your interest as a character study because of strong performances by Daniels and Stone.