No one can wring more left-field laughs out of bellicose pronouncements and blithely oblivious bellows than Will Ferrell. He takes something that’s a bit of a crutch and comedic cliché in the hands of lesser actors — mock intensity — and through sheer and sustained force of, well, will, makes it palpable and real. The NASCAR racing comedy Talladega Nights marries these, the arbitrary piecemeal delights typically found in any Ferrell movie or performance, to a comfortably ramshackle and good-natured top-dog-made-underdog narrative, the end result being a mainstream, mass-appeal comedy smash, and one of the most purely unfettered and pleasurable theatrical experiences of summer.

After a prologue charts Ricky Bobby’s adolescence — quickly establishing his drug- and drink-addled absentee father, Reese (Gary Cole), and the tunnel-visioned quest for excellence that instills in him — the movie gets Ricky to the winner’s circle in just over 10 minutes flat. With Cal Naughton, Jr. (John C. Reilly), his ever-loyal best friend and perpetual second banana, at his side, Ricky has millions in prize winnings and all manner of lucrative endorsement contracts. He also has a hot, gum-smacking (if somewhat gold-digging) wife, Carley (Leslie Bibb), and two sociable, foul-mouthed sons, Walker and Texas Ranger. Yes, life is good for Ricky, and his win-at-all-costs approach has made him a national hero in short order.

A frightening crash, however, sends him to the hospital and robs him of his nerve, and Ricky falls on hard times. Booted from his racing team and left by his wife, Ricky returns to his small hometown and gets a job delivering pizzas. Cal and Lucius (Michael Clarke Duncan), his ex-crew chief, try to coax him back into action, but it takes reconnecting with his father and mother (Jane Lynch) and former assistant Susan (Amy Adams) to put Ricky back on the winning track.

On a more than subliminal but hardly politicized level, Talladega Nights plays as a filmic extension of the trademark man-child obliviousness Ferrell brought to his Saturday Night Live interpretation of President George W. Bush. Squinty and possessing of an unerring confidence — he describes himself as a big, hairy American winning machine — Ricky’s mantra is, “If you ain’t first, you’re last.” He’s funny, yes, but he works as a character at least partly because he’s such a product of the current zeitgeist — a swaggering cowboy brought down to Earth. It’s no particular coincidence, either, that the movie’s “villain” is a gay Frenchman, Formula One racecar driver Jean Girard (an amusing Sacha Baron Cohen), who shows up to challenge Ricky for NASCAR superiority and expedites his fall from grace.

As a film, Talladega Nights evinces much more of a sense of rootedness than Anchorman; cinematographer Oliver Wood (The Bourne Identity) captures the pulse-pounding reality of the racing sequences in poker-faced fashion, and director Adam McKay and Ferrell’s script has a more finely attuned and (nominally) realistic trajectory. While still seeded with whiplash reversals, the underlying impulses and motivations are all real, and part of the difference between the two collaborations is that Talladega Nights drags the audience in on the characters’ pop-psychological evaluations. Ergo, dim bulb Cal is subconsciously aware that he holds jealousy over Ricky always finishing first and refusing to share the spoils (“I’ll just bury it deeper down inside!” he exclaims agreeably after Ricky declines to let him win), just as Reese is aware of his primal urge to sabotage things when he gets a belated chance at some semblance of familial normalcy. The old adage is “if you can’t fix it, feature it,” and Talladega Nights does this to wryly winning effect, even going so far as to tweak the movie’s sponsor and product placement deals, of which Ricky is obviously a proxy holder.

While not without a small handful of dry spells, the laugh factor in Talladega Nights is certainly as high as if not higher than anything else this summer. Possessing pitch perfect timing and finely honed improv instincts, Reilly and Cole are excellent additions to the cast, and really flesh out their characters. Ferrell, meanwhile, delivers another indelible and hilarious character — deserving, indeed, of his own ballad. (Columbia, PG-13, 108 mins.)