Richard Wong’s exhilarating movie Colma: The Musical (2006) is set in a town south of San Francisco most famous for its cemeteries and the fact that it has more dead residents than there are alive. Colma’s writer and actor, the ridiculously talented H.P. Mendoza, who plays Rodel, gets a lot of mileage from this central metaphor. The suburban deadness that infects the characters—fresh high school graduates with nary a clue about what to do with themselves—is only a little more vital than the graveyards all around them.

Colma revolves around the lives of three characters: an aspiring actor working “the highest-paying shit job” he can find at the mall, an aspiring writer thrown out of his house by his homophobic father, and a woman—well, it’s not really clear what she does, but as the emotional center of the film, the lovely Maribel (L.A. Renigen) does have the best monologue (and taste in interiors, for that matter).

What elevates this from your run-of-the-mill comedy is the fact that it’s a musical, perhaps the most cinematic of forms, the combination of its general grounding in reality—in the case of Colma: The Musical, the enervating flatness of suburbia—and the unreal compulsion to burst into song. This unaccustomed exteriorization of the characters’ emotions, erupting into the narrative, is part of the technique; the viewer is always aware that she or he is watching a movie. But Colma is also quite conscious, and not just in a mocking way, of the absurdity of the genre. (The digs at regional musical theater, for instance, are particularly funny.) The mawkish, sometimes unbearable honesty that accompanies teen angst is lovingly recontextualized here.

“We are so mature for our age,” Billy (Jake Moreno) sings to himself after kissing his brand new girlfriend-to-be for the first time. It’s something of a joke in the context of the movie: a kind of late-adolescent inflated sense of self, made funnier by the emotional immaturity constantly on display. One has the growing awareness that the way they torment each other, sometimes affectionately (or, in some cases, rail against the shallowness around them), is proof of a couple of things: 1) that there really isn’t much of anything else to do in the burbs anyway, and 2) that it reflects their chafing at the bit at the lot that the suburban deities have dealt them.

Colma: The Musical shows Mendoza to be a prodigious wit, both profanely funny and incisively smart, if a little too reliant on a synthesizer, probably recorded in a basement. (This may indeed have been the case.) Lyrically, the easiest comparison that comes to mind is Ben Folds. The writing, in any case, is sharp and all too real, from the stern immigrant father to the cluelessly hilarious way Renigen says the N-word with too much relish. It’s hard to pick a favorite scene: the eight-minute uninterrupted camera shot orchestrated by Wong at a drunken college party (ostensibly, a bunch of SF State hipsters), the cheerfully vicious sing-along in a bar, the unexpectedly poignant dance sequence in a cemetery, or even the goofy montage that introduces the movie.

Yes, it’s a first film, and it looks like one, and if my mention of that fact makes it sound like a disclaimer, it’s not. A weaker comedy would have cast “a lovable pack of misfits”—or if this were a drama, a group of Abercrombie & Fitch models—so it’s quite refreshing to see normal-looking people in this movie. Sometimes they’re not entirely lovable, sometimes they sing off-key, but I’d take this over any new Hollywood musical any day.

(If I do have one minor quibble, it’s the way the screenplay takes liberties with the geography. Sure, it’s fine to pass off The Bitter End or Java On Ocean as being in Colma—though that’s not necessarily implied in the film—but Serramonte Mall and Westmoor High and all those fogged-out little boxes are in Daly fuckin’ City! Plus the cast should have fought to have their real butts on the DVD cover.)