Arlen Faber (Jeff Daniels) wrote a spiritual book a long time ago called Me and God. The book changed many lives, because people, apparently, have a lot of questions for God, and Arlen, apparently, answered them. And because, apparently, everyone in America is a complete fucking moron, they believed that he answered them by actually asking God to God's great big face. (Seriously, this is the conflict at the climax of this movie—he has to confess to disappointed fans that he and God are not tight bros.) Now Arlen is haunted by his early success, and becomes a half-hearted recluse (he still totally goes out and does stuff, he's just mildly irritated about it), and can't write anymore, and develops many insincere quirks involving action figures and not touching his dead dad's piano. But when he meets a wacky chiropractor (she eats soy bacon and egg whites!) and a greasy young recovering alcoholic (Step Four: Wash Your Hair, Man), Arlen is forced to loosen up, learn from the wisdom of children, make out with Lauren Graham, and be a human again. STOP ME IF YOU'VE HEARD THIS ONE BEFORE.

I remember once in college, a friend of mine gave me an impassioned speech about the problem with movies that are about books. Like, when a character in a movie (e.g., Arlen Faber) is famous for having written Earth's Most Ecstatically Brilliant and World-Changing Combination of Words Ever Committed to Paper, but we can't know anything about the book specifically because the filmmakers have neither the time nor the talent to write such a book. The movie can never follow through. It just expects us to believe, on good faith, that this dude wrote the best book ever and to rest all of our sympathies and expectations for the plot of the movie on that completely baseless promise. Then my college friend made me watch Wonder Boys (literally infinitely superior to The Answer Man), which neatly solves the dilemma by revealing, in the end, that the film's narration was dude's next book all along, and since Michael Chabon (an actual writer) wrote it, it's actually kind of believable as a good book. To contrast, here is a sample line from The Answer Man: "I've seen hell, and its name is Reno, Nevada."