Our Idiot Brother is a 2011 American comedy-drama film directed by Jesse Peretz and starring Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks, Zooey Deschanel and Emily Mortimer.

Ned Rochlin, a biodynamic agriculture farmer who is living with his girlfriend, Janet, gets tricked and arrested for selling pot to a uniformed police officer.

Ned has three sisters: Miranda, a journalist hoping to get her first major article with Vanity Fair and harboring feelings for her neighbor, Jeremy; Natalie, a hipster living with her girlfriend Cindy and other roommates; and Liz, a housewife married to Dylan, a documentary filmmaker who is inattentive; they strictly control their son River, unable to express himself or choose his activities, putting him in interpretive dance class when he longs to take taekwondo.

When a police officer asks him to move it, Ned runs upstairs for the keys and discovers Dylan naked with Tatiana.

Ashamed, Ned returns to the farm; Janet does not let him rent the barn or leave with his dog, “Willie Nelson”.

Miranda takes Ned to verify the details of her article, but he won't sign a release as Arabella spoke to him privately.

As Cindy and Ned sneak onto the farm to retrieve his dog, when he mentions Nat's infidelity, she angrily calls her from inside the house.

A few weeks later, at lunch with Ned, his sisters all have improvements in their lives: Cindy plans to accompany Nat to her prenatal appointments; Miranda has started a relationship with Jeremy, and Liz is dating and letting River be himself.

[6] They planned to cast actors with whom Peretz was already friends, and created the main character with Paul Rudd in mind.

[6][7] The script was written by Evgenia Peretz and her husband David Schisgall, and was completed by December 2009 under the original title of My Idiot Brother.

[7] The principal cast was announced in early June, including the roles played by Rudd, Elizabeth Banks, Emily Mortimer, Zooey Deschanel, and Rashida Jones.

[9] Additional cast members including Hugh Dancy, Kathryn Hahn, Shirley Knight, Janet Montgomery and Steve Coogan were announced in late July.

The site's critical consensus reads: "It's decidedly uneven, but like Paul Rudd's performance in the title role, Our Idiot Brother is too charming to resist.

[13] Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade "C+" on a scale of A+ to F.[14] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film 3 out of 4 stars, and wrote: "It's refreshing, this late in the summer, to find a hot weather comedy that doesn't hate its characters and embed them in scatology and sexual impossibilities.