The sweet stench of failure hangs like a cloud over Owen (son of Kevin) Kline’s excellent feature debut; a film so malodorous and barely house-trained that one is half-tempted to prop it outside by the bins. I liked this a lot. Funny Pages spins a hilarious tale from the fringes of the underground comics scene, powered by a wonderfully sour performance by Daniel Zolghadri as Robert, a teenage cartoonist who strikes out on his own.

Working as a clerk inside a tatty district attorney’s office, Robert is stunned to discover that one of the deadbeat clients is none other than Wallace Schearer (Matthew Maher), the assistant colourist on some of his favourite old editions. In Robert’s eyes, Wallace is an unsung hero, a comic-book Picasso who has fallen on hard times. To everyone else he’s a walking disaster, the sort of wayward, cantankerous misanthrope who should on no account be invited to the family home for Christmas dinner.

And yet Wallace, it’s alarming to note, is merely the principal weirdo in a rogues’ gallery of losers that runs the gamut from Robert’s twitchy best friend to the residents of a basement flophouse downtown. Each is fuelled by uncompromising nerd fury; each bent out of shape by their devotion to pop culture. These dreamers and schemers aren’t bad people, exactly. Like Jessica Rabbit, they’re just drawn that way.

• In cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema