Nerdist’s first feature film, Zero Charisma, premiered at New York Comic Con last night and is already available on demand. But starting today, it can be seen in a few theaters around the country, which means the reviews are trickling in, and they’re mostly positive. The film, in which Sam Eidson plays a role-playing gamer whose life is jolted when a charismatic nouveau nerd joins his game, currently has a 75% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 63/100 on Metacritic.
The Village Voice praises it as “raw and affecting, a real movie rather than fan-con fun,” and The A.V. Club calls it “a barbed indie character study that seems perched, like Big Fan, between dark humor and probing psychodrama.” Slightly more hesitantly, The New York Times calls it a “fearless dive into the very particular obsessions of the waning subculture of tabletop gaming” but says that while it has “plenty of humor but no satirical bite.” Variety calls it “a consistently entertaining, character-driven comedy set within a community rapidly losing out to online options,” but concedes that “the ending, while amusing, doesn’t quite resolve the pic’s various conflicts.”
Below, check out a trailer for the film:
