And guess what? It's about a washed-up comic...

Neil Hamburger is to star in his own film with Hollywood actors Michael Cera and John C. Reilly.

In Entertainment, Gregg Turkington, the creator of the washed-up stand-up in the soiled tuxedo plays to type, portraying a’ broken-down comedian' attempting to revive his career in a series of dead-end shows across California's Mojave Desert en route to meeting his estranged daughter.

Director Rick Alverson co-wrote the film with Turkington and Tim and Eric's Tim Heidecker, but he likes to improvise from loosely sketched scripts without dialogue. He has previously joked: 'Hopefully, it'll be brutally depressing'.

Little else is known about the characters, with Turkington credited only as 'The Comedian' and Heidecker as 'The Celebrity'. Quantum Leap's Dean Stockwell and Bow Wow Wow singer Annabella Lwin also feature alongside Cera, whose credits include George Michael in Arrested Development and the lead in Scott Pilgrim vs The World.

Shooting on Entertainment begins next month, with a release date sometime next year.

As Hamburger, Turkington is releasing an album of stand-up and melancholy songs next month, First Of Dismay, featuring members of Jefferson Starship and The Germs, before performing 12 nights at the Edinburgh Fringe in August, followed by a run at the Soho Theatre in London.

He previously appeared in Alverson's bleakly humorous 2012 film The Comedy, which starred Heidecker as a loathsome Brooklyn hipster and featured Heidecker's comedy partner Eric Wareheim.

Hamburger was a guest star in their sketch series Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! and shot the pilot of a surreal game show with the pair in 2009, The New Big Ball With Neil Hamburger.

Hamburger also cameoed in Tenacious D's 2006 film The Pick Of Destiny, where he's seen performing before the band in a bar and bombing after delivering his trademark lament: 'But that's my life!'

Opening for Jack Black and Kyle Gass' band on tour, the character has occasionally been pelted with coins. But at their inaugural comedy rock festival, Festival Supreme, in Los Angeles last October, he performed hundreds of 30-second sets to one person at a time, with the queue for the intimate gig reportedly over a mile long.

-by Jay Richardson

Published: 27 Jun 2014