The typical high school movie has a plot line that goes like this: Students collectively arrive at standards for deciding a status order for the group. Good looks, athleticism, and social skills typically form the standards by which each student is ranked. The high-status people form an in-group with a very strict social social boundary, keeping the majority of lower status students in the out-group. The cool people constantly pick on the nerds and remind the latter that they would like to join the in-group, but will never be allowed to do so. After considerable abuse, the nerds commiserate with one another and form a mutual support group. As the drama unfolds, the cool people turn out to be shallow and not very intelligent. The nerds, by contrast, reveal themselves to be deep, authentic, capable of true friendship, and above all intelligent. These qualities allow them to defeat the cool people at their own game (revenge of the nerds).

The happy end is perfect when one of the cool people realizes that the people in his social group are shallow. By joining the nerds, the nerds become cool. For the first three quarters of his high-school flick, the 24-year-old writer and director Jared Hess breaks radically with his plot line. The cool people in his Idaho small town are barely cool. And the nerds and their low-income families are really dumb. Napoleon Dynamite is one of them.  Napoleon cannot lead himself and is very slow. The film tries to achieve a comic effect by focusing the camera on the dreary and boring daily routines of the nerds and the families in which they were socialized. Hess studies in detail how their bodies movie clumsily through the world which they are not able to master. Hess