Will Ferrell, at the best of times, is an acquired taste. The blockbusting comedian and headlining star of Anchorman and Talladega Nights regularly bludgeons his audience into submissive giggles by sheer force of personality. Hysterical outbursts, petulant rants and violent tantrums are his forte. Nuance, naturally, is not. And yet, ironically, this same monstrous presence saves the basketball comedy Semi-Pro from generic banality, and pushes it instead into strange off-kilter places.

Set in 1976 as a minor-league basketball team in Flint, Michigan, attempts to upgrade to the majors, the movie is superficially similar to sports comedies such as Dodgeball and Ferrell's own Blades of Glory. It features a gang of wildcard amateurs, including Woody Harrelson's fallen idol, Monix, and André Benjamin's sharp shooter, Coffee Black. It has an erratic team leader in Ferrell's owner, coach, player and former pop idol Jackie Moon (he boasts a lone smash single, Love Me Sexy). And it follows the team's progress, including training montage, from no-hope zeroes to sporting heroes.

This, however, is where the similarities end. For Moon is such a huge character, and so monumentally played by Ferrell, that he transforms the film into a haphazard series of Moon-centred vignettes loosely hung around the sports-movie format. Witness his breezy entrance into a grim Michigan nightclub, sliding into the DJ booth, slapping his single down on the turntable and announcing, without irony, to the expectant crowd, “You're a sexy town, Flint!” Or his full-body tantrum at a boardroom meeting where he takes zany Jerry Lewis physicality to its limits. There's even an ingenious Russian roulette sequence that's deftly played for laughs at an after-hours poker game (the gun has one bullet: they don't know it; but we do).

Better still, Semi-Pro has bear wrestling, an eerie love triangle between Monix, his lover Lynn (Maura Tierney) and her superfan husband Kyle (Rob Corddry), and one of the inkiest colour palettes since The Godfather.

On the downside, the lines are not particularly memorable and Tierney disappears completely in the third act. But by then the movie's absurdist humour and muted ambitions have paved a path for slipshod anarchy, and hinted at greater things to come from future Ferrell movies.

15, 90mins

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