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“In a Sentimental Mood,” the old Dorsey Brothers instrumental ballad, pops up several times in the course of Brian Hecker’s “Bart Got a Room.”

But Hecker’s wry comedy is the opposite of sentimental, at least until the end – and even then, it’s sweet in a palatable, uncheesy way.

Not that it adds up to much. Hecker creates his own high-wire act – sort of a “can you top this?” series of scenes of his central character’s self-induced embarrassment and occasional humiliation, mixed and matched with moments with his family (also embarrassing) and the family of his best friend (even more embarrassing). Eventually he can’t top himself and goes off a deep end. So a promising comedy builds to a deflation instead of a climax.

At its core, “Bart” is a prom-date story. Danny Stein (Steven Kaplan) is a student officer at a Florida high school and one of the prom’s organizers. All he hears from everyone around him – his parents, his friends, even his teachers – is that prom is the most important night of his life. And nothing is more important than getting a great prom picture.

But who to take? He’s got no girlfriend, though he has lots of big ideas about who he could take. There’s that sophomore cheerleader (Ashley Benson) to whom he gives a ride home from school everyday. Or that bright Asian girl in his English class whose journal entries, read aloud in class, seem to match his for angsty uncertainty.

His divorced parents (Cheryl Hines, William H. Macy) have ideas about fixing him up – but their own lives are in such disarray that Danny has a hard time taking their suggestions seriously. Still, he’s got to do something; even Bart (unseen until almost the end but invoked as the pinnacle of loser-ish nerditude) has a date and has booked a room at the hotel where the prom is being held.

There is, actually, one obvious choice: Camille (Alia Shawkat), Danny’s long-time best friend and fellow prom-planner. She keeps saying they should just go as friends, so they each have someone to go with. But Danny remains inexplicably convinced that there’s an undiscovered hottie out there somewhere who has both escaped his notice and is secretly dying to date him.

Hecker unspools the familiar story of Danny’s pursuit of a prom date against the aggressive drumming urgency of Gene Krupa’s “Sing Sing Sing (With a Swing),” giving Danny’s quest a life-and-death quality that is meant to be comic overstatement. This works for a while but the law of diminishing returns – well, you know, it’s the law.

Still, there’s something bizarrely amusing about William H. Macy in a Jew-fro as Danny’s date-challenged father (at one point, a single mother with a baby actually ditches him in a restaurant). On the other hand, Cheryl Hines, as Macy’s ex-wife and Danny’s mother, is a funny actress stranded without anything funny to do – except react to Jon Polito as an aging suitor. But Polito faces a similar lack of funny material.

As Danny, Steven Kaplan has a nice deadpan quality that works whether he’s trying to appear cool or avoid acknowledging humiliation. It’s not his fault that Hecker’s script runs out of steam. Similarly, Alia Shawkat, so funny as Maeby on “Arrested Development,” doesn’t have a lot to work with here, other than to blossom before Danny’s unappreciative eyes.

“Bart Got a Room” pulls you into its comically hyperbolic world of teen anxiety – and is solid enough for long enough to disappoint you in the end.

So, the recommendation is not recommended.