“The Rockerâ€Â is a film about a forty-something wannabe rock star who worms his way into his teenage nephew’s band.

Rainn Wilson plays Fish Fishman, a paunchy workaday drone and has-been drummer from Vesuvius, an ‘80s rock band that dumped him the very day it hit the big time.

Fish has been nursing his grudge for two decades, and when a co-worker raves about the group and plays a track from their latest smash album, he runs amok. Dominoes fall as he gets fired, loses his girlfriend, and moves in with his sister̢۪s family in Cleveland, where the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame seems to mock him from every shot.

When his loser nephew̢۪s high school band loses its drummer right before the prom, Fish fills in. Through an inexcusably dumb chain of events, the band becomes a YouTube sensation and the band goes on tour.

In a distastefully predictable and improbable climax, the battle of the bands brings Fish and friends up against his old antagonists on Vesuvius.

“The Rocker’sâ€Â screenplay holds some interest as a storehouse of used comedy ideas. Repeated head-bangings? Check. Paunchy pale guy wearing tighty whities? Check. Adult man-child behaving in age-inappropriate ways? Double check. This film is just another hairball clog in the seasonal glut of dumb comedies.

Peter Cattaneo, director of the warmhearted “The Full Monty,â€Â fumbles here, opting for broad, lazy satire of stereotypes rather than creating only a couple of carefully individualized characters. Wilson is all over the map and Jane Lynch is stiff and stern as his disapproving sister. The film works better for Emma Stone as the band’s wry, rebellious bassist. In every scene, she’s a hilarious representation of teen exasperation.

But two great cuts don’t make an album and fine supporting performances don’t make “The Rockerâ€Â worthwhile.

The film is a banal concoction of hair-band gags and unconvincing romantic comedy.

Colin Covert, McClatchy Tribune