With their new movie “Edie Arnold Is a Loser,” directors Megan Rico and Kade Atwood are aiming to ride the same nerdy comedic vibe that made “Napoleon Dynamite” a cult classic two decades earlier.

Both were shot on shoestring budgets by filmmakers with a connection to Brigham Young University, chronicling high school kids charmingly outside the norm. Rico and Atwood say they’ve never met the Utahns who made “Napoleon Dynamite,” Jared and Jerusha Hess, though they want to.

“We would love for them to moderate our Q&A at the Utah premiere,” Atwood said in a virtual interview last week.

The Utah premiere is set for Friday, Sept. 4, at 7 p.m. at the Broadway Centre Cinemas, 111 E. 300 South, in downtown Salt Lake City. It comes six months after its debut at SXSW in Austin.

Tickets for the premiere are $27.50, and include appearances by the cast and crew. Tickets for screenings the rest of the week are $13.75, the Broadway’s usual general admission.

Edie Arnold, the title character (played by Adi Madden Cabrera), attends Our Lady of Undying Sadness, an all-girls Catholic school, where she avoids the mean popular girls and daydreams through choir practice about Walter Boyd (Lucas van Orden), aka “the altar boy,” from the nearby boys’ school.

Edie plays drums, and is persuaded by fellow outcast Frances (McKenna Tuckett) to hear a punk band at a club. When the band’s drummer passes out, Frances goads Edie to fill in on percussion.

Soon, they and two other pals are forming a punk band, a rebellious act that would upset Edie’s status-conscious mom (Cherish Rodriguez) and their school’s stern head of discipline, Sister Myra (Star Hermann).

Rico wrote the first draft of “Edie Arnold Is a Loser” 10 years ago, in college, and it was the first feature film she ever wrote.

“It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, one day I’ll make this,’” Rico said. “I was just, like, ‘OK, that’s the one that you write when you’re learning how to write.’”

The story was inspired by “my own experiences, my own angst, my own gripes of growing up kind of a loser in an all-girls Catholic school in Miami,” she said.

The story was also “a little bit of wish fulfillment,” she said. “I wasn’t in a punk band, but boy, oh boy, did I wish.”

As Atwood sees it, “Megan thought the story was very generic.”

“She’s, like, ‘everyone goes through this experience,’” he said. “And I was, like, ‘No, I did not have a nun [as] the head of discipline at my school that loved to yell at children.’”

Rico set aside the script to get her career going in New York, working on shows like “Impractical Jokers.” She moved to Provo in 2021 to write for the BYUtv sketch comedy show “Studio C,” where she met Atwood, a director and camera operator there.

The two teamed up with the goal of making a feature film. Their first effort fell apart, and then Rico showed Atwood her script for “Edie Arnold Is a Loser.”

“I was, like, ‘I’m not a girl, and I’m not Catholic, so I don’t know, but I guess I’ll read it,’” Atwood said. “I was shocked by how much it resonated with me. … I knew these characters growing up, but I had never really seen them portrayed on the screen — rambunctious or horny or messy.”

Making a movie with little money

Making their first movie, Rico said, “we were naive in a way that really served us well.”

They set a deadline to start production, Rico said, and decided ”however much money we have by that time is the budget.”

They ended up having enough saved to shoot for 10 days, which isn’t “enough time to make a movie,” Atwood said.

But they learned to economize on the fly — like staging a scene in a way that only took two shots instead of 20, so they didn’t need to reset the lights and camera over and over.

The cast also improvised and explored their characters in rehearsal, without cameras, Rico said.

“Once we were on set, we’re, like, ‘All right, guys, military precision, let’s go,’” she said.

And they got lucky finding prime filming locations for little or no money.

The outside of the Catholic school was filmed at the South Salt Lake Community Center, for instance, formerly known as Columbus School; the school’s interiors were shot there and at the Madeleine Choir School.

On State Street, the live event venue The Beehive doubled as the punk club where Edie and Frances’ band performs.

There also were moments of serendipity, like the van they saw parked out front while filming at The Beehive. Atwood said they found the owner and said, “Hey, your van’s really cool. Can we use it for a movie?” The owner agreed.

“It’s just such a cool community that everyone wants to contribute and be a part of,” Atwood said.

A ‘Dynamite’-inspired opening

Rico said their movie’s opening credits were inspired by the opening of “Napoleon Dynamite.”

In “Edie Arnold,” the cast and crew’s names are written on various school objects — a student’s shoe, a backpack, and so on.

The credits of both movies, Rico said, are “very practical, very of the world that the movie takes place in.”

Rico said they edited the credits to the beat of a song they wanted to use — and later learned they couldn’t get the rights to it. “We were freaking out,” she said.

She talked to a musician friend, Anand Wilder (from the now-defunct band Yeasayer). “He was, like, ‘I’ll write you guys a song, a custom song, that fits the credits the way you have them edited.’ We were, like, ‘OK. How much money is that going to cost? Because we don’t have any more money.’ And he’s, like, ‘No, dude, I’ll do it just for you.’”

After the Salt Lake City premiere, Rico and Atwood plan to take “Edie Arnold Is a Loser” on a 21-city “roadshow” tour, screening it with Q&A sessions after each show. Then, on Oct. 9, they plan to release it more widely, in New York, Los Angeles and other cities.

Atwood said they don’t yet have plans to sell the movie to a streaming service. “Our hope is that people see it in theaters,” he said. “Watching a movie, especially a comedy, alone on a couch vs. in a theater — laughing with a group of people — is a very different experience.”

Rico said she also hopes that “people who maybe feel like they don’t quite fit in find a place in this movie, and find themselves celebrated a little bit.”

“… I feel like if I was younger and I watched this movie, it would give me confidence, because I was a weird kid in school,“ she said, ”and I wasn’t able to hide it. I think [a movie like this] just would have helped me accept it a little bit more.”

Correction • 10:40 a.m., Aug. 30, 2026: This story has been updated to correct the last name of Adi Madden Cabrera.

Correction • 11:15 a.m., Aug. 31, 2026: This story has been updated to correct the last name of Anand Wilder.