A tender heart in stretchy pants and ankle boots in 'Nacho Libre'

Gentler than Jim Carrey, more playful than Ben Stiller, able to leap tall tales in a single bound, Jack Black is the one guy in American movie theaters right now who knows how to coax out the genuine article, the laugh that begins by tickling your belly before it starts shaking you silly. In his endearingly ridiculous new film, "Nacho Libre," he plays a crusader of sorts in mask and cape, working his daft magic well enough to suggest that he just might be the missing comic link between a smarmy-pants like Vince Vaughn and a "what-me-worry" na?f like Will Ferrell.

Daniel Daza/Paramount Pictures
Jack Black, right, plays Nacho, a cook in a Mexican orphanage by day who moonlights as a wrestler.

A sweet bliss-out cooked up by the writers Mike White, Jerusha Hess and Jared Hess, who also directed, the film finds Mr. Black front and center as Nacho, a half-Mexican, half-Scandinavian monastery cook from Oaxaca, who aches to belong to another brotherhood, that of the luchadores, or masked wrestlers. Orphaned at a tender age and reared in the monastery, Nacho wears the humble robe and sandals of a penitent. But underneath the Friar Tuck exterior lurks the heart, soul and fast feet of a ringmaster, a man born to knee drop on an opponent's head as effortlessly as a prima ballerina executing an echappe saute. And beneath the heart, soul and feet? A performer burning to deliver us into joy.

Comic actors are always looking for love, but one of Mr. Black's signatures is how belligerently he solicits our affection. Unafraid of looking like a jerk, he has carved out a modest but memorable screen niche playing self-aggrandizers - the music-store snob in "High Fidelity," the preening music teacher in "The School of Rock" - who walk and talk much bigger than they actually are, sometimes because they're totally clueless, sometimes because they're not. Yet even at their most aggressively unself-conscious, say, as the director in "King Kong," the characters invariably arrive at a moment in the story when they seem compelled to expose their soft underbelly to us, like the misunderstood pit bull that really just wants to cover you with kisses.

Nacho, who rustles up the monastery's daily beans and chips, is cut from softer cloth than most of Mr. Black's characters. Crucially, he adores the other orphans, who help tether him to the monastery, even after he steps into the wrestling ring. As in Jared Hess's breakout, "Napoleon Dynamite," character is plot in the film, and what drives the story, ever so leisurely, aren't events and incidents, but simpler things, like Nacho's inherent decency and his vanity. (He's a sucker for white ankle boots.) Just as important are his evolving relationships with his fight partner, Esqueleto (a terrific Hector Jimenez), and with the distractingly beautiful Sister Encarnacion (Ana de la Reguera), who looks rather like the nun Penelope Cruz played in Pedro Almodovar's "All About My Mother."

Mr. Almodovar dedicated his film, in part, "to men who act and become women." The writers of "Nacho Libre" don't unpack gender as elegantly as Mr. Almodovar does, but they don't have to: like "Napoleon Dynamite" (which the Hesses, who are married, wrote) and "Chuck & Buck" (Mr. White's feverish brainchild), this film starts from the premise that masculinity is nothing if not fluid. Here, then, is a true rarity: a Hollywood comedy in which a man with a thing for the ladies (O.K., nuns) makes nice, sometimes in tights, and no one even thinks to call him a sissy because no one in the film thinks in such stupid terms. As Nacho explains matter of factly, "When you are a man sometimes you wear stretchy pants in your room. It's for fun." Well, of course.

Mr. Black delivers those lines with the lilting singsong you hear in Mexican or, rather, Mexican-accented English, but, like everything else in the film, both the accent and the delivery are strategically out of the realm of the real. Like Peter Sellers's floridly Teutonic voice in "Dr. Strangelove," you hear the quotation marks in the delivery and the thought that goes into every phrasing. That gives the lines chew - Mr. Black's arrhythmic use of the word "whatever" verges on the Brechtian -and it also works to the film's liberating vision of identity as a performance space, an existential wrestling ring, if you will, in which each of us, if only given the opportunity, can cavort freely in the mask and colored tights of our choosing.

"Nacho Libre" marks a nice step forward for Jared Hess, who has started to shake some of the tics - the obsessively symmetrical setups, the menagerie of user-friendly geeks - that gave "Napoleon Dynamite" the flavor of an American Gothic pastiche, David Byrne's "True Stories" as recycled for the Sundance generation. He still leans too heavily on bad grooming and body fat for giggles and can carelessly slide into cruelty. But perhaps because he's operating outside his country and perhaps, as a consequence, his comfort zone, he doesn't seem as eager to sell his characters out for a laugh. And, in any event, I'm not sure that Jack Black or at least Nacho would let him. To be honest, it's the sweetness here that kills. If the whole thing weren't so gloriously nonsensical it just might make you cry.

"Nacho Libre" is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). Some of the ring action may be a bit intense for wee ones, though the double-entendres should fly right over their heads.