Paul Aufiero has one love in his life, and that love is the New York Giants. It’s the kind of love recognizable to any fan (sports or otherwise), the kind of love that engenders a love of trivia and no sense of nuance. Paul sees everything and yet sees nothing. His love is deep and very personal, but that’s not to say it’s monochromatic; to a certain kind of fan, despairing over your beloved thing is almost as much fun as adoration.

In all other parts of his life, Paul (played by Patton Oswalt) is childish and defensive, and not without reason: He is constantly berated by his family to get a real job (his current gig is holding down a toll booth at a parking garage in NYC), find a woman, and above all grow up. Paul only truly comes alive on game day, and on the nights he calls in to a sports talk radio show on WFAN. There, Paul spouts banal profundities (painstakingly composed in that lonely toll booth) like a man possessed. Most of the time Paul is a loser, but on WFAN, for a spare few minutes at a time, he is a star.

It takes a calamitous encounter with (and a savage beating from) Paul’s favorite Giants player to knock his life out of orbit, and much of the business of Big Fan is occupied with whether or not Paul will recognize what, exactly, has been done to him… and by whom.

It’s a character study, in other words, and both the press material and interviews with Oswalt and writer-director Robert Siegel (who previously wrote The Wrestler) are chock full of comparisons to Taxi Driver and other ‘70s-era films about unlikable losers who are unable or unwilling to rise above. It isn’t much of a spoiler to say Paul refuses to “grow” in the way we typically expect movie protagonists to.

This is a movie that should speak directly to me. I have been Paul and I have known Paul. (Chances are you have, too.) It’s not just football, though I play tourist with the Alabama Crimson Tide twelve Saturdays a year; as Oswalt pointed out in an interview with the Onion A.V. Club, our world is increasingly about obsessing over whatever weird little thing appeals to us. If you’ve ever signed an online petition, you know what he’s talking about.

But there’s a coolness to Big Fan that makes it damn near impossible to connect with. Oswalt isn’t the problem; he’s equal to the task of his first dramatic lead, and his pudgy figure gets us halfway to the man-child he portrays with convincing sullenness. The direction, too, is adequately authentic and seedy. Like early Scorsese, Siegel’s New York City by night is a collection of ill-lit islands in a sea of murky darkness.

The problem is the script’s tendency to overreach. Siegel is unable or unwilling to trust his audience to keep up, and he often feeds us one line too many just to make sure we know exactly how poignant or meaningful a scene is supposed to be.

The movie begins with one such faux profundity as Paul mulls over one of his scripted rants: He wants to complete the sentence “I can’t tell you how sick I am of…” but he stops cold for what feels like a dozen times. The truncated line is “I can’t tell you how sick I am.” See what he did there?

I haven’t seen The Wrestler, so I can’t say if this toxic juxtaposition of gritty verisimilitude and melodrama is par for the course for Siegel. Just when we‘ve reached some sublime level of absurd mundanity with Paul, just when we get intimate with a man defined by a profound lack of depth, Siegel pulls out the bullhorn. As one-note as Big Fan’s concept may be, executing it well is delicate work. Siegel is not up to the task.