"I'm told it's the least Canadian thing you do," Michael Sparaga told a robust RPL Film Theatre audience at the Saturday night screening of Sidekick.

The screenwriter and producer was talking about self-promotion, something he's become an expert in over the last month, as he, director Blake Van De Graaf, and lead actors David Ingram and Perry Mucci have taken their film across Canada with the goal of building a Canadian audience for a Canadian movie.

It's a confoundedly more Quixotic aim than it should be. As both Sparaga and Van De Graaf told the audience, there's no precedent for theatrical success of Canadian movies in Canada. English Canadian films typically account for about one per cent of Canadian box office revenues, In Quebec, by comparison, one in four films seen in theatres in 2004 were produced locally. Teen sexploitation comedy Porky's held the domestic box office record for nearly two decades until 2001's curling comedy Men With Brooms won the homegrown bonspiel.

While Canadian filmmakers like Guy Maddin, Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg have brought critical attention to Canadian art house cinema, and Canadians like Ivan Reitman, Norman Jewison and Paul Haggis have become major players in Hollywood, Canadian-made films just don't play in Canada. While Sidekick, made for $35,000 (supplied by Sparaga's credit cards), may not shatter that long-held "cultural cringe", it certainly chips away at it.

Norman Neal (Mucci) is an archetypal geek. From a closet he shares with a photocopier, he's the nigh invisible one-man IT department for a Toronto investment firm. He spends most of his free time talking superheroes with Chuck (Daniel Baldwin) at the comic shop. When he sees an arrogant coworker, Victor Ventura (Ingram), display telekinetic abilities, Norman sets out to train the reluctant Victor to become a superhero.

Victor, however, is more interested in using his developing superpowers to get free booze and humiliate others than in rescuing cats from trees or other noble pursuits. Pressed on by Chuck, who thinks Norman is merely writing a comic book rather than living one, Norman tries to impart some compassion onto Victor in an attempt to get him to live up to Norman's heroic ideal. "It's not a cliche," Chuck says. "It's FORMULA -- and it works."

It may work in comic book cities like Metropolis or the Marvel Comics version of New York City, where, the saying goes, "with great power there must also come great responsibility." But this is Toronto and despite one night of quintessentially Canadian crimefighting, Victor's sense of responsibility begins and ends with Victor.

Without giving away too much of the plot, the film ends where most superhero flicks would begin. Van De Graaf proudly noted that his $35,000 87-minute film would be "a five-minute flashback you see in most $60 million superhero movies."

While you'd never confuse the production values of Sidekick with those of a multimillion-dollar blockbuster, it's a perfectly functional popcorn flick that charmingly melds the superhero movie clich -- er, formula with the sensibilities of workplace comedies like Mike Judge's Office Space or Gary Burns's paean to Calgary office towers, Waydowntown. Mucci's Jimmy Olsen-esque Norman deftly rides the line between sympathetic and, well, pathetic. Ingram tempers Victor's Torontonian swagger with moments that uncannily recall Christopher Reeve's Superman.

Most impressive, however, was the unbridled enthusiasm the cast and crew have shown for the film.

Sparaga, in particular, has an infectious and inspiring zeal. While it's impossible to predict whether or not his efforts to bring Canadian movies and Canadian moviegoers together will usher in a new era of Canuck cinematic populism, he certainly makes it seem feasible.