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For some reason, it's very hard to represent nerds onscreen. Movies keep trying it, but, for whatever reason, they seem to end up with endless variations of the characters from Revenge of the Nerds, with their thick glasses, pocket protectors, questionable hygiene, and adenoidal voices. The truest screen representation I recall is in the brief seen in War Games in which Matthew Broderick visits two computer programmers for advice, not simply because one of the programmers is very thin and the other quite stout, but because both demonstrated a singularly fanatical interest in the inner-workings of computers while voicing it in an unaccountably hostile manner; nerds sometimes seem exhausted and furious at the world for not sharing their obsessiveness. The worst onscreen nerd is a parody, Nerdlinger, from a teen sex romp briefly shown on The Simpsons, who is in the process of building a bra bomb.

The nerds in Fanboys are somewhere between War Games computer programmers and Nerdlinger. The filmmakers obvious have real experience, and real affection, for actually obsessed science fiction fans, but they have the questionable filmmaking skill of the anonymous hacks who helmed any number of 80s teen sex comedies. And so the story they tell isn't a very good one and not very well told. It's a road trip, set in 1998, in which a small gang of obsessed Star Wars fans decide to travel cross country to George Lucas's studio to steal and watch a copy of the newest Star Wars movie. They are motivated by one in their gang, a cherubic young man who would look more at home at a Lollapalooza concert than a science fiction convention. We're told he is in the last stages of terminal cancer, but he doesn't look it or act it. At least, when old movies would give us beautiful dying characters, they would have them cough occasionally to show that they are sick. This film doesn't even bother with that.

But his invisible mortal illness is all just pretext for a road trip, and, as road trip movies go, this is a particularly disappointing one. It feels like a movie about a road trip made by people who have only experienced America from inside its airports. Road trip movies generally try to meticulously detail the path its travelers take, and how it changes the characters, for better or worse. This element of travelogue was firmly in place when Mark Twain wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which the Mississippi River acted as the book's highway, and it's the defining aspect of every important road trip story, from Easy Rider to the documentary Road Scholar. But the characters in Fanboys barely notice the road, and their stops along the way are accidental -- as when they have a blow out and must get a tire repaired at a dive bar filled with gay bikers -- or setups to weak-sauce punchlines, such as when they stop in Riverside, Iowa, to visit the future birthplace of James T. Kirk and beat up some Trekkies. This scene was shot in Las Vegas, by the way, and the film didn't even bother to try to hide the fact, as the Plaza Hotel is plainly visible in the background.

This is a film with some small pleasures and large annoyances. The pleasures mostly come from the cast, which features, most notably, Jay Baruchel, a lanky and thickly bespectacled actor who seems born to play nerd roles, but carries himself with an unexpected verve, as though the whole world simply hadn't caught on yet to how cool he really is; I suspect they will. The unlikeliest member of the group is actor Dan Fogler, a pudgy and wild-haired man with a penchant for taking hard rock poses and mouthing movie tough guy dialogue. His performance is really a satire of how easy it is to adopt a rock star persona, and how inappropriate it often is, and it seems out of place in this film (although, in fairness, it's often very funny); the filmmakers occasionally feed him Star Wars trivia so he can spout it and seem like he hasn't been wildly miscast, but properly he should be in a dramatization of Heavy Metal Parking Lot. The film also makes extensive use of cast members from Judd Apatow, particularly Seth Rogan, who appears in three roles. Rogan seems to have filmed this while he was slimming down and bulking up for the Green Hornet movie that he may or may not make, as he appears as a gormless lump of a Star Trek fan early on, and, later, as a hyperactive pimp with a tough-guy mustache and exposed biceps, and it's impossible to believe it's the same actor in both roles.

But the movie also makes room for a large number of cameos by science fiction notables, including William Shatner and Carrie Fisher, and these are handled with excruciating awkwardness -- they're shoehorned in, for no reason other than a cheap nod to the actual fanboys in the audience, who, presumably, would chuckle with delight at seeing, say, Kevin Smith appear for seven seconds as himself. I'd like to think better of real fanboys, and imagine them to be above such pandering, but the audience I was with seemed to enjoy the cameos. I guess when you feel alone enough in your obsessions, you'll take any knowing wink, even when they are crass.

But the real pity of this film is that a nerd roadtrip across America could be a legitimately fascinating film. After all, nerds really built a lot of what we now think of as America, and the mostly did it in small, unexpected places. As an example, Minnesota alone was one of the birthplaces of modern role playing games, and was the home of the Cray computer, and was where science fiction authors such as Clifford D. Simak and Gordon R. Dickson did most of their writing, and that's just scratching the surface of notable moments in Minnesota nerd history. A film that traveled to the various geek shrines in the United States would have been terrific; it has yet to be made.