Way back in November, a Hollywood Reporter Sundance prognostication story alerted the world to Paper Heart, a “part-documentary, part-scripted comedy” starring Michael Cera and his real-life girlfriend Charlyne Yi. The trade said the film’s sales agents were hoping “to limit advance word, presumably in the hopes of making a splash a la Sundance phenom Napoleon Dynamite.”

Said sales agents must have been really upset that the Reuters-syndicated trade wrote a big story about the movie weeks before the festival lineup was even announced, thus ensuring that this project previously known to virtually no one would not only suddenly become the hottest ticket of the festival, but that its extreme hotness would be telegraphed in publications potentially read by the suburban teenagers who will make up its target post-Sundance ticket-buying audience. Let’s all shake our fists in frustrated solidarity: darn you, Hollywood Reporter!

Anyhow, now that the cat’s out of the bag and Paper Heart is en route to its big Saturday night premiere at the Racquet Club, the question on everyone’s minds is this: Who is this young lady who has landed Hollywood’s Most Eligible Bachelor Best Known For His Role in A Comedic Teenage Incest Subplot?

Her YouTube channel has some answers.

Yi’s YouTube presence combines a variety of lo-fi, tweemo music videos withshort, one-joke stunt videos. My favorites are Man on the Street, where Yi goes out on Hollywood Boulevard, microphone in hand, which she points at both humans and inanimate objects, posing smilingly without saying a word or asking them to; and Video of me Ice Skating, featuring a grinning Yi’s index and middle fingers gliding across a dramatically-litexpanse of tin foil. There’s a couple of moments in Man on the Street where one of Yi’s male marks looks down on the teenage girl-statured comedienne in absolute bemusement, obviously completely charmed by her adorability. Really, that’s the draw: It’s a comedy of extreme adorability.

Yi was originally billed, in the Sundance competition slate announcement, as the co-writer of Paper Heart, but now both Sundance’s website and IMDb credit her only as the film’s star. This may be an effort to further fudge the line between narrative and documentary, but it’ll be interesting to see how much of her inimitable character, which is all over her YouTube videos, seeps into the film. Any bets on how long it takes for for someone to blurb her as “the Asian girl version of Napoleon Dynamite!” with tongue nowhere in cheek?