Outside Providence

(Miramax)

This Farrelly brothers film has Tim Dunphy (Shawn Hatosy) getting his chance to escape gritty Pawtucket when he spends senior year at a snooty boarding school, leaving behind a crippled kid brother, his perennially stoned friends, and his gruff-but-tender dad (Alec Baldwin, doing a fine Ralph Kramden). The Farrellys, sharing script credit with director Michael Corrente, skirt many of the expected clichés, but the story they deliver is as thin as rolling paper.