Character actor Adam Scott (“Step Brothers”) proves he has leading-man chops as an angry misogynist construction worker in “The Vicious Kind.”

Scott is viciously unkind, spewing random but hilarious tirades as a chain-smoking jerk who hasn’t slept in a week. As the movie settles down in its second half, though, it turns out his main problems, as revealed over a Thanksgiving weekend in Connecticut, aren’t as interesting as Scott’s performance.

The guy’s estranged dad (J.K. Simmons, who also gets laughs) cheated on his dead mother, and his college-age brother’s girlfriend (Brittany Snow) reminds him of the woman who dumped him. As the little brother, Alex Frost has a thanklessly bland role. He seems to be present only as a blank contrast to his edgy older sibling.

The film, written and directed by Lee Toland Krieger, isn’t the first indie movie to have more success in building characters than in giving them something to do, nor the first to hint at more complicated secrets than it ultimately delivers, but Krieger and Scott come up with a caustic anti-hero worthy of being played by Jack Nicholson in the 1970s.