This independent comedy about two assistant managers at a chain grocery store vying to become the manager of a new store has been getting some surprisingly poor reviews. My guess is that they’re coming from writers lucky enough never to have worked a job in the retail sector. As someone who spent four years as assistant manager of a chain drug store, The Promotion rang pretty true to me. Think of it as The Office set at Tops. Doug (Seann William Scott) is 33, married to a nurse, and living in an apartment where the walls are less soundproof than a screen door. He longs for the day when he can wear long sleeves and get called “Mister,” instead of by his first name as it’s printed on the front of his short-sleeved store tunic. He’s so sure of getting the promotion that he and his wife Jenna Fischer start shopping for a house. But he gets a competitor in William (John C. Reilly), recently moved to the area with his wife and daughter from another company store. Somewhat older and coming off a checkered past, William is desperately trying to make up for lost time. The problems of real people trying to navigate their way through a corporate system that considers them less important than arbitrary exercises of company policy is the real theme of The Promotion. Filmmaker Steve Conrad (his directorial debut after scripting The Pursuit of Happyness and The Weather Man, two other films about men in the work world) takes a deadpan approach to material that occasionally slips into farce, not always comfortably so. But it’s his essentially humanistic concerns that win out in myriad small touches, like when William, talking to his wife (Lili Taylor) on the phone after a bad day, says “I feel like I’m at camp and I want to come home.” If you’ve never had a job that made you feel that way, count your blessings. Most of us, though, will relate.

—m. faust