Move over Milk. I Love You Phillip Morris does the gay rights movement one better, using in-your-face comedy and mainstream casting to defuse whatever anxiety the Heartland might have with guy-guy relationships — the irony being that this outrageous conman comedy from Bad Santa scribes Glenn Ficarra and John Requa was originally supposed to be directed by none other than Gus Van Sant. When Van Sant dropped out, the writers stepped in to shoot their own screenplay, resulting in a first-time film that feels more polished and professional than 90% of the studio comedies in theaters these days.

It helps that Ficarra and Requa went in with a proper script, an ingredient too frequently missing in Judd Apatow and Adam McKay’s improv-happy method, where a cocktail napkin sketch of a plot seems to be all the team needs. No doubt Ficarra and Requa allowed their leads, Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor, a certain flexibility in interpreting their parts, but it’s refreshing to find a comedy that cuts together, where one scene sets up the next and ideas planted early in the film pay off for bigger laughs later on. The final gag, which shows an unmistakably phallic-shaped cloud, completes a joke set up in first-act flashbacks to Steven Jay Russell’s childhood.

Who is this Russell fella? He’s a Virginia/Florida/Texas con-man who, over the course of the movie, works as a cop for a few years, has a daughter by a good Christian woman, gets mixed up with the law, goes to jail and meets the love of his life, a man named Phillip Morris (yes, like the cigarettes). When Russell’s sentence ends, he poses as a lawyer and springs Morris from prison before his penchant for criminal deception lands them both in the slammer all over again. Only the most twisted comedy writers could dream up such a plot, but Ficarra and Requa didn’t have to. It all happened. Well, probably not quite like this, but something tells me the facts were probably even more outrageous.

Now, take a minute and try to imagine what Gus Van Sant would have done with the material. For the life of me, I can’t picture it. It’s all about tone, and I Love You Phillip Morris depends on the trickiest of balancing acts. Even getting a performance like this from Jim Carrey, who manages to play it along the lines of his Man on the Moon Andy Kaufman persona (cocky, charming, a little crazy, but free from the bug-eyed bellowing and sad-clown shtick that sometimes creeps into the actor’s bipolar acting history). It sets up a world in which a well-adjusted family man can be seen tucking his daughter into bed or patiently praying with his wife one minute, then going doggy-style on some dude in a hotel room the next, with nothing more than a voice-overed “Did I forget to mention I’m gay?” to help audiences cope with the record-screech revelation.

Everything hinges on that moment. Ficarra and Requa could’ve introduced the idea in a million ways — with Russell cruising someone in the produce department or tapping his feet in an airport bathroom — but they go all the way, with a burly trucker type screaming “Do it, come in my ass!”, and Carrey obliging. Progressive and/or desensitized viewers will surely hate the scene, wishing for a little subtlety, but in this day and age, the only way to sell a gay sex scene is through comedy, and the I Love You Phillip Morris team isn’t content to settle for some respectable rutting (a la Brokeback Mountain) or tasteful displays of public affection (the way Milk does it, downplaying the “sexuality” in “homosexuality”). Russell probably didn’t have the kind of sex this scene implies –– nor do most gay men –– but by cutting straight to the extreme, Ficarra and Requa inoculate the squeamish.

After all, being offensive is easy (catch any episode of Family Guy, and you’ll witness “how far can we go?” humor in practice), but it takes a special gift to be as strategic about button-pushing as I Love You Phillip Morris is. Take an off-hand scene in which Russell begins his first day on a new job (he’s conned his way in to a CFO position with a major financial company) and he asks his black assistant for coffee: “I’ll do that today,” the poised young lady replies, “but I don’t do that really.” With that fleeting exchange, the screenwriters widen the net, playing once again on the characters’ and audiences’ stereotypes. The next time we see Russell at work, he has a new assistant, this time a flaming gay man, because the world is backwards, and progress doesn’t happen overnight.

For most of the movie, Russell’s homosexuality is just one more trait in the character’s quiver, which is the kind of ideal depiction GLAAD is always going on about, but I Love You Phillip Morris is actually stronger when the movie is making a big deal of the relationship. Who can possibly resist the stretch in which Russell falls for McGregor’s wide-eyed Southern boy in prison? But as soon as they’re both on the outside, the focus shifts to a more straightforward con-man movie — still twice as entertaining as Catch Me If You Can (not to mention such superficially similar Carrey comedies as Liar Liar), and yet a little light on the relationship plot that planted the audience’s butts in the seats in the first place.

“Is the gay thing and stealing something that goes hand in hand?” Leslie Mann (playing Russell’s religious wife) asks early on, perfectly summing up the perception the movie hopes to correct. It’s not easy to get audiences to root for a gay relationship involving a character they otherwise disapprove of, but I Love You Phillip Morris pulls it off, not by offending everyone in sight (the prevailing tactic in un-P.C. comedies), but by showing it’s OK to laugh at such things.