MOVIE · 1979

The Jerk

Comedy94 min

Raised by a poor Black sharecropper family and stunned to learn he was adopted, Navin Johnson heads out into the world with no plan and limitless confidence. Steve Martin is Navin, an earnest fool who stumbles from one absurd turn to the next — odd jobs, a sudden invention windfall, a romance with Bernadette Peters’s Marie, and the kind of trouble that keeps finding him. Directed by Carl Reiner, the 1979 comedy follows Navin’s rise and fall through a chain of increasingly offbeat episodes, with Martin’s blank sincerity holding together the movie’s broad, shaggy chaos.