CEDAR RAPIDS* Rating: R for crude and sexual content, language and drug use.* Running time: 1 hour, 27 minutes.
They were staples of popular literature, Broadway and the movies long before the movies could talk: comic yarns in which small-town naifs pack their bags and hit the big city, where they learn about life and love and what they’ve been missing.
Modest in every way, “Cedar Rapids” is enjoyable in the telling even when the details smack of contrivance.
Ed Helms, a “Daily Show” alum and “The Office” regular, plays the most sincere insurance agent in fictional Brown Valley, Wis. The character’s name is Tim Lippe, pronounced “lippy,” a homebody who has never ventured far outside of his comfort zone, and who considers himself “pre-engaged” to the woman he’s seeing (Sigourney Weaver), his former seventh-grade teacher.
Then come a few startling developments nudging our hero into unexplored territory. When his fellow insurance agent is found dead due to autoerotic asphyxiation, Lippe is dispatched by the boss (Stephen Root) as the replacement representative attending the annual upper-Midwest insurance convention in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Lippe’s mission is to return home with the coveted Two Diamond award, a symbol of the prize-winning insurance agency’s commitment to community, customer service and God.