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There’s a time-honored tradition of sitcom stars (Mystery Team features Community’s Donald Glover, Parks and Recreation’s Aubrey Plaza, and 30 Rock’s John Lutz and Kevin Brown) making feature films to emphasize the stuff they can’t do on TV. Mystery Team delivers on that score: it’s not for anyone too squeamish about assorted bodily functions, or anyone offended by salty language. There’s also a tradition of padded-out recapitulation of the gags they’re best known for and general lameness. Mystery Team almost completely* avoids this trap, thanks to its unusually large but generally sharp and off-kilter writing team, which includes leads Glover, D.C. Pierson, and Dominic Dierkes, as well as director Dan Eckman and producer Meggie McFadden. (Large chunks of the crew also worked on the 2006 short “Checkout,” which I now want to see, and studying the credits gives the impression that this is more a case of a few names helping friends to get their film made than sitcommers trying to transition to box office stardom).

Mystery Team strikes me as the inverse of Rian Johnson’s terrific Brick. Brick applied noir detective tropes, plot elements and mood to a story set in a high school; Mystery Team applies “Hardy Boys” or even Scooby Doo-styled high school elements to an adult detective story. In both films the two modes collide with startling results. Mystery Team plunges its hapless naifs into an encounter with the town off-the-rails drug dealer and a strip club of positively Lynchian nightmarishness, but what elevates it to near genius is that the adult plot operates almost completely under the narrative logic of the juvenile mystery. It also doesn’t hurt that the three leads demonstrate good comic timing and a believable chemistry. Glover is better than the hit-and-miss Community might lead you to expect; Pierson and Dierkes are even stronger.

* There’s an introductory segment before the title sequence that felt dreadfully forced — lots of beats on that were clearly supposed to be laughs, but fell flat for me. It’s possible that it took me a few minutes to calibrate my expectations to the film’s internal logic, but I think the intro was just bad.

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