Hey, ever wonder about the secret lives of those guys dancing around in the Subway sandwich outfits in 100-degree summer heat, and all that brought them to that point? Then Kabluey might be for you. Unemployed, socially inept, 32-year-old Salman (Scott Prendergast, also the writer-director here) is dispatched to Texas by his mother to help his sister-in-law Leslie (Lisa Kudrow) tend to her two hell-raising youngsters while his older brother is off fighting in Iraq. Forced to pitch in, Salman takes a humiliating job as the costumed corporate mascot — a sort of cross between a giant faceless Smurf and Marvin from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — of a gone-bust Internet company, passing out fliers on a lonely highway outpost. In the process he learns a dark secret about his sister-in-law, gets hired as the entertainment for a children’s party by Christine Taylor (below left) and experiences an unlikely blossoming of confidence.

So, is Kabluey, with its emotionally stunted, man-child protagonist, a complex, seriocomic metaphor about life in wartime? Not really. There are a few obvious if unstated connections made to why Leslie’s boys are acting out so, but mostly this is a tale of minor-chord transcendence that’s willing to trade on the time-honored comic value of padding about in giant foam suits. And that works, by and large… that’s good enough. The film’s nagging problem, though, is how thinly Salman is sketched, and the fact that as an actor, Prendergast plays his lead as too much of a collection of self-negating tics. As a filmmaker, though, he’s great at capturing varying states of agitation and anxiety with idiosyncratic brush strokes, so the movie, after a chaotic opening third, still achieves a pleasant hold. For more information, click here. (Regent Releasing, PG-13, 87 minutes)