A Look at "Klown," a Raunchy Danish Comedy WHEN Frank Hvam and Casper Christensen, creators of the popular Danish television series "Klown," decided to make their first feature film, they knew two things. One, they wanted to involve a child. "Klown," which ran for six increasingly beloved seasons before ending in 2009, was, like "Curb Your Enthusiasm," a show that found humor - and at times pathos - in the exquisitely bad judgment and behavior of its stars. Mr. Hvam and Mr. Christensen have become famous in Denmark for following their own worst instincts. "When we started the series," Mr. Hvam said in a phone interview from his garden in Copenhagen, "we made a list of 20 taboos, from racial issues to cannibalism to pedophilia to cancer, Down syndrome, all kinds of terrible things." They then addressed them, episode by episode. There was just one line the pair refused to cross. "We thought it would be too brutal to bring in a child into our universe," Mr. Hvam said. But when it came time to make a film based on the series's characters, Mr. Hvam said, he and Mr. Christensen decided they had become adept enough as comedians to "manage to have a child without it all exploding." The second thing the two men wanted to do was make a road movie. Here too, though, there was a problem: They couldn't find enough road. "Denmark is a very little country," Mr. Hvam said. You can drive from one end to the other in four or five hours. So we had to slow the process down by putting them in a canoe. The result was "Klown," a barbed satire of boorish male behavior and one of the funnier and more outrageous films to hit this country so far this year. It will open in select American theaters and on-demand platforms on July 27, having had its debut in 2010 in Denmark, where, according to Danish Film Institute figures, "Klown" was that year's top domestic film at the box office, coming in second only to "Avatar." Nearly 20 percent of the Danish population has seen the film, a figure that does not include Mr. Christensen's two children, 12 and 14. "When I realized that I couldn't show the movie to them," Mr. Christensen said, from a beach outside Copenhagen, "I realized that we had gone too far." Here "Klown" is being marketed by its distributor, Drafthouse Films, as Denmark's answer to "The Hangover." But "Klown" is a very different sort of movie - messier, less calculated in its provocations and more personal. But the affinity between the two is beyond theoretical: Todd Phillips, the director of "The Hangover," is producing an American version of "Klown" for Warner Brothers, with Danny McBride, of HBO's "Eastbound & Down," on board to write the script and star. "Klown" tells the story of two men, Frank and Casper, played by Mr. Hvam and Mr. Christensen, who set out on what is supposed to be a debauched, sex-mad river tour of their country, only to be derailed by Frank's decision to abduct his pregnant girlfriend's 12-year-old nephew in a misguided attempt to prove his merit as a potential father. Most of what follows is not fit for a family newspaper; the rest involves Frank and Casper drinking and smoking themselves insensate, leering at teenage girls and running frantically around in the nude, leaving a trail of dispirited women in their wake. At the film's heart is a sweetly sentimental friendship that blooms between hapless Frank and the gawky, stolen nephew, Bo (Marcuz Jess Petersen). But that bond does not keep Frank and Casper from photographing the shy young boy from the waist down as he sleeps: blackmail, they figure, should he decide to report back what they've been up to. In Denmark "Klown" was produced by Zentropa, the company run in part by the director Lars von Trier, who has long been an advocate of Mr. Christensen and Mr. Hvam. Mr. Christensen had a role in Mr. von Trier's comedy "The Boss of It All"; in turn the director wrote an episode of "Klown" called "It's a Jungle Down There." "It's about women's pubic hair," Mr. Hvam said, laughing. "Klown," which was made for around $2.5 million, resembles at times some of the austere, Dogme 95-style films Mr. von Trier and Zentropa are known for - it was largely shot on location, the camera frequently hand held - but the creators of "Klown" say the similarities were mostly because of their movie's budget. "It's easier to say "Dogme" than "We didn't have the money," " Mr. Christensen said. The director, Mikkel Norgaard, used a small crew, and, as on the series, the film's dialogue was improvised. The "Klown" script was less than 30 pages long: "Every scene was like: "Frank enters," " Mr. Norgaard said. Nevertheless, there are sly nods to the foundational Dogme film "The Celebration," as well as to Alexander Payne's "Sideways" - late in the film, Casper sports a bandage on his nose in homage - and, somewhat more improbably, "Deliverance" and "Apocalypse Now." "We don't have big rivers," Mr. Norgaard said apologetically. So this canoe trip was the wildest we could get it. In Denmark, Mr. Christensen, 43, has been a screen presence and household name since he was a teenager, finding ubiquity as a game show host and sitcom standby. He and Mr. Hvam, 41, met when Mr. Hvam, at the time an unknown comedian, began doing a bit about "how terrible a person Casper was," as Mr. Hvam described it. After Mr. Christensen tried - unsuccessfully - to get Mr. Hvam fired, the two men decided to work together instead. Their adversarial friendship - in which Mr. Hvam plays the timorous, pratfall-prone sidekick and Mr. Christensen the domineering alpha male - became the source material for "Klown." "Of course, we turned up the volume a lot," Mr. Hvam said. But the relationship is like it is. Mr. Hvam and Mr. Christensen plan to begin writing their next film in January. The future of "Klown," after its release here, belongs to Mr. Phillips and Mr. McBride. "It's their movie now, and they're very clever guys, so I'm sure they'll come up with something great," Mr. Hvam said. "You Americans are actually very good at remakes," he continued. You're very tight, and you're very effective in your humor. In Europe we can be so slow sometimes - just the camera on one face for 30 seconds. Who can stand to look at the same man for 30 seconds?