Napoleon Dynamite star Jon Heder picks up his first titular role in a while in When Jeff Tried to Save the World, an unpolished indie comedy that will do absolutely nothing to resurrect his acting career. Heder's Jeff is the manager of Winky's World, an old school bowling alley and arcade that is facing closure.

Jeff likes his job and seemingly nothing else. When he is informed that the alley's owner Carl (Jim O'Heir, "Parks & Rec"'s Jerry) is about to sell the dying business to investors who plan to raze it and build a strip mall, Jeff scrambles to keep afloat the only thing in his life with meaning, spontaneously planning a Friday Fun Day event with free pizza, live music, and a two games for the price of one special.

Meanwhile, Jeff's younger sister Lindy (Anna Konkle) and her roommate/best friend Samantha (Maya Erskine) come crash at his apartment without advance notice. The unexpected guests would really put a crimp in Jeff's life if he had one, but he doesn't. The biggest source of conflict lies in the fact that Jeff's parents and Lindy all think he works in IT. No one knows he has done nothing with his computer engineering degree.

When Jeff Tried is inert, tedious, and humorless. The closest the movie comes to finding a rhythm is in stringing together montages of Jeff's morning routine of lighting up the lanes and spraying down the rental shoes with disinfectant, a montage it repeats twice. Our protagonist is not well-defined or multi-dimensional enough to elicit anything resembling empathy and the few characters who share the screen with him -- teenaged pothead Stanford (Brendan Meyer), the owner's alcoholic ex Sheila (Candi Milo), and the overly exuberant handyman Frank (Steve Berg) -- do nothing that can be described beyond those phrases.

A glimmer of hope emerges late in the game narratively when a mysterious old bowler known only by the nickname El Diablo (Robert Breuler) is found to be living behind the lanes, but this too goes nowhere, leading to a finale that gives no meaning to anything that has transcended thus far. Fortunately, by then you've only spent 90 minutes or so in this universe and it doesn't feel too much longer, which is perhaps the closest thing to a compliment you can attach to the film.

While the movie eludes praise, it does wield a pretty solid explanation for its failings: director/co-writer Kendall Goldberg is a newcomer who conceived this project in film school as a thesis of sorts. I'm not in the habit of reviewing student films, but I imagine this one wouldn't seem terrible in comparison to most. Unfortunately, it made the national film festival circuit not as a student film, but just an indie feature, so therefore the criticism is warranted.

Filmmakers don't have to be good out of the gate, but this comedy is so dysfunctional and aimless you have to wonder how someone sees this and wants to give Goldberg a second chance. As for Heder, it's easy to imagine a universe in which the heavy breathing high school outcast he played in his late twenties was his only claim to fame. Instead, Heder went on to enjoy mainstream work for several years including the Happy Madison baseball comedy Benchwarmers (2006) and 2007's Blades of Glory as co-lead with Will Ferrell. Now on the other side of forty, his recent filmography consists largely of voiceover work and it's tough to imagine that changing even with his willingness to act in movies with evidently shoestring budgets plain to see. Presented with an apparently made-up Indie Vision award at the Twin Cities Film Fest's post-screening Q & A, Heder's dry performance is as much to blame as anything for the movie's failings, given how much the threadbare screenplay stays fixed upon his character.