Let us now praise semi-famous women.
Maybe you know who Anna Faris is. Maybe you don't. It probably depends on how old you are. The actress's recognizability - her pop-culture Q score, if you will - splits neatly along age lines because, frankly, she appears in movies that people who like to think of themselves as grown-ups tend to avoid. Youth comedies, splattery horror farces, things like that.
And she steals them.
This isn't as easy or as rewarding as it sounds. When someone like Philip Seymour Hoffman in "Charlie Wilson's War" commits grand multiplex larceny, audiences and critics applaud. Faris, by contrast, has a knack for being the very best thing in very bad movies.
So while not many people want to admit they sat through the execrable 2002 Rob Schneider film, "The Hot Chick," those who did know that Faris just about made it bearable as a woman weirdly turned on by a man's soul in her best friend's body. Or how about the silly romantic comedy "Just Friends" (2005)? If not for her slapstick turn as a Courtney Love-style rock star, the movie would be landfill.
Still, if a tree falls in an entertainment wasteland, does anyone hear it?
With the DVD release on Tuesday of "Smiley Face," Faris continues her termite assault on America's pop culture. The new film from writer-director Gregg Araki ("Mysterious Skin") gives the deceptively ditzy actress, 30, a rare leading role as a stoner having an extremely bad day. Even rarer, Faris is allowed to give a full-on comedy performance: rubber-faced, loose-limbed, proudly unsubtle. At times watching the character you can't help thinking: This is Lucy Ricardo. This is Lucy Ricardo on drugs.
The bad news is that the movie, a potential star-maker, has gotten lost in the indie film shuffle. Indulgently received at last year's Sundance, "Smiley Face" had the misfortune to get picked up by First Look Releasing shortly before the distributor's top executives were reshuffled in a boardroom putsch. The film finally hit New York and LA theaters in limited release last November and is getting its broadest exposure on DVD. Apparently, the nation's moviegoers aren't ready for a female variation on "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle."
No, "Smiley Face" isn't art. Yes, it's as broad as a barn. As Jane, a bonghead with vague dreams of being an actress, Faris spends a catastrophic morning and afternoon pinballing across Los Angeles, trying to pay back her pot dealer while struggling to get to an audition. Every encounter is charged with a sense of brain-crimped wonderment (with the occasional detour into paranoia), and because Faris makes the character so open-hearted, you come to cherish Jane even as you're glad you don't actually know someone like her. Unless you do, in which case good luck.
Like its addled heroine, "Smiley Face" is something of a mess, and it does eventually wear out its welcome. Yet Faris's unrestrained performance sticks. In a film industry where women are expected to behave decorously or rebel glamorously, this actress is a throwback to the days of Carole Lombard - a pretty woman unafraid to take pratfalls.
Longtime Faris watchers have seen this coming. Born and raised in Seattle, she got her first break in 2000, when Keenen Ivory Wayans cast her as Cindy Campbell, the virginal cluck at the center of the first "Scary Movie." Then a brunette, Faris made the character memorable with what has become her trademark: dopey dialogue delivered with a slightly befuddled air of intensity. Cindy's always half a beat behind everyone else, but she really wants to catch up, and the effort makes her adorable. "Call it women's intuition or ESPN," she says, "but I can always sense when danger's near."
Faris stuck with the "Scary Movie" franchise through three increasingly lowbrow sequels ("Scary Movie 5" is due later this year), and her loyalty is similarly endearing. The movies are junk, occasionally inspired in a Mad magazine, anything-goes way, but they've made her name among young moviegoers, and she has used the cachet to expand her reach.
A Faris performance is usually buried in a horror movie or youth comedy of the sort critics automatically dismiss (if it's even screened for them). She's usually the wittiest thing in it, not to mention the most sexually unpredictable. She played a flirty lesbian in the alt-horror film "May" (2002) and an aggressive waitress in "Waiting" (2005), and her best-friend role in "The Hot Chick" brought a happy air of kink to an otherwise smug bore.
Faris shows up in more culturally respectable fare, too, although further down the cast list. That's her in "Lost in Translation" (2003) as a Hollywood actress who daunts mousy Scarlett Johansson, and her brief appearance in "Brokeback Mountain" (2005) as the hot-to-trot Lashawn Malone single-handedly raised the film's pulse to above standing level. On the other hand, "My Super Ex-Girlfriend" (2006) wasted Faris in an underwritten supporting role that gave her little room for comedy.
She managed to find some anyway. As anyone knows who witnessed her rambunctious physical knockabout in "Just Friends," Faris isn't a precision farceur. Her timing is sneaky, though, and almost always on the money. It takes a smart actress to play a proudly dumb character like Jane in "Smiley Face," staggering optimistically across the lawns of LA while clutching a first edition of "The Communist Manifesto" (don't ask).
Faris is even able to suggest a Jane that got lost somewhere along the way - a onetime economics major with a full complement of brain cells - and imbue her with residual sadness. It's a fearless performance, as nuanced as it is silly, and there isn't another young actress that could pull it off. With "Smiley Face," Anna Faris has arrived at last - in your video store. Is it too late for anyone to notice?
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/ movies/blog.
