With just two weeks to go until its limited release, “Paper Man,” which stars Jeff Daniels, Ryan Reynolds, Emma Stone and Lisa Kudrow is starting to pick up a little momentum. While there have been a handful of scenes on YouTube of Ryan Reynolds in bleached hair and blue tights for several months, the trailer has just come to our attention.
“Paper Man” is a “coming-of-middle-age” comedy centering on the friendship between washed-up author Richard Dunne (Daniels) and Long Island teen Abby (Emma Stone) who connect over the fact that they both have imaginary friends. Richard’s friend, Captain Excellent (Ryan Reynolds) has guided him through his entire life to that point, including his marriage to his beleaguered wife, Claire (Lisa Kudrow). Abby has an imaginary friend of her own played by Keiran Culkin and seems to spur Richard to a new level of maturity.
“Paper Man” made the rounds at a number of festivals including the Los Angeles Film Festival last June and the Florida Film Festival this weekend. It’s written and directed by husband and wife team Kieran and Michele Mulroney who have since been hired to author the script for “Sherlock Holmes 2.”
The trailer shows Daniels having a few goofy interactions with Reynolds, inviting Emma Stone to babysit at his house and then revealing he doesn’t have a baby, and bonding with her over creating paper chains and what appears to be a couch constructed of his own unsold novels. In one of the handful of scenes out there that we’ve included below Lisa Kudrow shares a lobster dinner with Daniels and he muses on what it would be like to live in a “buttery world”.
We’re still not entirely sold on the story’s familiar dramatic arc, but it’s good to see Reynolds hamming it up as an imaginary superhero. “Paper Man” opens on April 23rd. — Nathan Sizemore
