Name: Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass
Director: David Wain
Genre: Comedy
Released: 2026-07-10T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 93 min
Cast: Zoey Deutch, Jon Hamm, John Slattery, Ben Wang, Richard Kind

For Gail Daughtry, a “celebrity hall pass” is supposed to be the safest kind of fantasy — a hypothetical, a bit of bedroom comedy, a name you never actually expect to meet. Then her fiancé uses his. David Wain’s new film, “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass,” builds an entire road comedy out of that humiliation, sending Zoey Deutch’s small-town heroine to Los Angeles to collect on a pass of her own — and pointing her at the one famous face she decides will even the score: Jon Hamm, playing a version of himself.

The setup is as broad and as brazen as the title. Gail is a Midwestern bride-to-be whose tidy life detonates the moment her partner treats their joke agreement as a binding contract. Humiliated and newly unmoored, she heads west with a friend and a grudge, convinced — with a psychic’s encouragement — that the only way to repair the relationship is to balance the ledger. Wain, working from a script he co-wrote with longtime collaborator Ken Marino, treats the quest as both revenge fantasy and nervous satire of an industry that runs on access, proximity and the illusion that fame is something a person can simply walk up and claim.

Hamm is the engine of the film’s central joke, and he is not the only “Mad Men” veteran willing to be the punchline. John Slattery also appears as himself, extending a streak of self-deprecation that has quietly become one of Hamm’s most reliable comic registers — the impossibly handsome leading man who is in on every joke about being impossibly handsome. The conceit lets Wain stage celebrity as a kind of haunted house, where every door opens onto a star happy to lampoon the public idea of who they are. It is also a sly bit of franchise mischief, a “Mad Men” reunion staged inside a movie about chasing famous people, with the actors cast precisely because the audience already feels it knows them.

Around them, Wain assembles the sort of deep comedic bench his films are known for. Marino takes a supporting role alongside Thomas Lennon, Richard Kind and Sabrina Impacciatore, while Ben Wang — coming off a run of high-profile leading turns — plays the younger traveler swept into Gail’s orbit. It is an ensemble built less for star wattage than for density of comic timing, the kind of cast that can make a thin scene land on delivery alone.

For Wain and Marino, the project is familiar terrain with a more combustible hook. The two helped define a certain strain of American absurdist comedy with “Wet Hot American Summer” and later “They Came Together,” films that treat genre formula as something to be cheerfully vandalized. Wain’s studio comedies — “Role Models,” “Wanderlust” — showed he could deliver a hard-R premise without sanding off the warmth underneath. “Gail Daughtry” reads as an attempt to braid those instincts together: the anarchic ensemble piece and the bruised relationship comedy, sharing one outrageous spine.

It also hands Zoey Deutch her broadest showcase yet. Best known for sharper, more controlled comic work, she is asked here to carry a film whose entire premise dares the audience to root for a heroine behaving badly on purpose. Deutch has spent years stealing scenes in other people’s films; here the picture lives or dies on whether she can anchor one. The role is a gamble in both directions — too sympathetic and the satire goes soft, too unhinged and Gail becomes hard to follow for an entire feature.

The film built its reputation on the circuit before it had a home. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and went on to play Tribeca, the Nantucket Film Festival and the Sydney Film Festival, accumulating the kind of word of mouth that turns a raunchy title into a sale. Sony Pictures Classics eventually acquired global rights, reportedly beating out Republic Pictures, Lionsgate and Vertical — a notable bet on a mid-budget, star-driven comedy at a moment when that category has all but vanished from theatrical release.

What none of the marketing can yet prove is whether a single transgressive idea can sustain ninety-three minutes. The “celebrity sex pass” is a superb elevator pitch and a precarious feature engine; comedies built on one provocation tend to burn through their strongest material in the first act. Casting real stars as inflated versions of themselves is a gag with a famously short half-life, and the picture’s fortunes will rest less on how many recognizable faces agree to be the joke than on whether Gail herself is a person worth following once the novelty wears thin. The premise gets the audience into the theater; only the character keeps them there.

“Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass” opens in U.S. theaters on July 10 through Sony Pictures Classics. The distributor holds global rights, but international release dates have not yet been announced.