Jon Hamm is the target in David Wain's new comedy Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, a story built around a small-town betrayal that sends its heroine chasing a celebrity pass through Los Angeles. The film, directed by Wain and co-written with Ken Marino, is set to screen at the Tribeca Festival on June 10 before opening in theaters on July 10.
Zoey Deutch stars as Gail Daughtry, a small-town hairdresser engaged to her high school sweetheart, Tom, when he sleeps with his own celebrity pass after a book signing. After the betrayal, Gail heads to Los Angeles with her friend Otto, where a psychic tells her the only way to save the marriage is to “even the scales” with her own celebrity pass. She sets her sights on Hamm, then teams with Otto, a talent agency assistant, a paparazzo and John Slattery while trying to track him down across the city.
The cast also includes Ken Marino, Ben Wang, Sabrina Impacciatore, Joe Lo Truglio, Tobie Windham, Mather Zickel, Matthew Jayson Cwern, Thomas Lennon, Fred Melamed, Michael Cassidy, Michael Ian Black, Richard Kind and Zac Oyama. The setup leans into a familiar celebrity hall pass joke, but Wain’s film gives it a hard left turn: the fantasy becomes a road map for revenge, and the revenge becomes the plot.
That fits Wain's lane. He is the filmmaker behind Wet Hot American Summer and Role Models, and this one appears to push the same mix of absurdity and emotional mess a little further. The film does not treat the hall pass as a punch line that ends the story; it uses it to start one. If the festival screening lands the way the premise suggests, the joke is not whether Gail wants Jon Hamm. It is whether she can turn humiliation into something that looks, in the end, like control.
