First-time writer/director Zach Braff, star of a television sitcom I had never heard of ("Scrubs"), also stars in this spotty but enjoyable coming-of-age tale. He plays Andrew Largeman, an actor coming home for the first time in nearly a decade for his mother's funeral. He's spent that time medicated to the gills, on mood-altering drugs prescribed by his psychiatrist father (Ian Holm), who was convinced that, because of his son's role in a family accident, Andrew needed to be kept in a state of near-somnambulism. Over the course of his short return home, he discovers, if not who he is, at least the idea that he needs to figure it out.

He actively avoids his father, and he quickly hooks up with his old friends from high school, who happen to be burying his mother. Several hours into his trip, and coming down off nine years of antidepressants, he ends up taking ecstasy and playing spin the bottle in the middle of a mini-orgy. While he's in town, he visits a neurologist because he's having headaches, and there he meets Sam (Natalie Portman), who is one of the biggest problems in the film. Sam is like a low-rent version of Kate Winslet's Clementine in the far superior Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind from earlier this year. She practically screams that she's the eccentric but loveable, true-hearted love of Andrew's life, who is there to help him straighten himself out. She has a wonderfully eccentric family and lives in an eccentric house full of eccentric pets. She's a plot device, not really a person. I guess that's the problem with most of the supporting characters in the film. They're there as symbols, not as people.

For example, I'm sure a lot of people you knew from high school ended up staying in your hometown, got regular jobs, married people they knew from school, and settled down into small-town lives. There's not a sign of that here. The remnants of Andrew's high school crowd are here, but they're all either hopeless or, well, hopeless. Peter Sarsgaard's Mark is not only a bit of a loser, he's a grave-digging, corpse-robbing loser who collects trading cards with the intention of living off his earnings when he sells them someday; he spends all day smoking pot and dreaming about a future that will never happen. Sarsgaard does wonders with the part, but he can't, in the end, bring life to the conceit. Their mutual friend Dave (Michael Weston) is someone right out of a movie script: he made a fortune inventing silent velcro, and now he lounges around his mansion attempting to amuse himself. There aren't any "regular" people in this entire film.

The film's other problem is its literalness. It is about Andrew's journey to find himself, but Braff decided to put him on an actual journey that seems like a series of episodes from a writer's workshop. It resembles nothing so much as a fancy scavenger hunt; it includes a scam at a hardware store, a visit to a voyeuristic hotel bellboy running a peepshow, and finally a trip to visit a guy who lives in a boat at the edge of an abyss. It's a little too eager to cover all of Life's Big Questions, in which it usually relies on Cinema's Big Clichés—in the same damn scene, angst-ridden characters scream into a literal abyss and kiss in literal rain. Whether this is self-aware or not, I'm not sure: did Braff laugh to himself and decide to put it in as a sly poke at the audience, or is it all in earnest?

The film's saving grace, ironically, is that earnestness. I honestly don't think it is a cynical attempt at manipulation, and because of that, its overdose of saccharine didn't bother me as much as it might have in a different movie. Braff comes across as someone who feels like he has something important to say, not as a con man pushing pre-labeled buttons. Braff really feels for his character, and Andrew's central problem—that he's exited childhood, is supposed to be ready to be an adult, but doesn't know who he is—is something that resonates with me, and is likely what makes so many people love this film. It was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination coming its way, although I strenuously hold that it wouldn't deserve to win. The film is often too tentative: it contains lapses where Braff seems unsure of where to go next, which he tends to cover by directing the hell out of the movie. These technical flourishes—fancy crane shots, slo-mo, fast-mo, blue filters, etc.—instead of being an indicator of a cocky awareness, seem more like things pulled from a young director's bag of tricks in moments of self-doubt. It mercifully foregoes the "I'm lost" spinning-camera shot, so at least we can be thankful for that.

The film is talky where it should shut up, as if Braff didn't trust his actors to demonstrate what he wanted to say without having to write little speeches for them; the "you can never go home" speech is the nadir of the talkiness. A lot of the dialog can serve as examples of this tendency: "Yeah, you're all right. You're alive!" "I know it hurts. But it's life, and it's real. And sometimes it fucking hurts, but it's life, and it's pretty much all we got." "This is your moment to do something that no one has ever done before." The latter statement is repeated twice during the film, and it made me wish Braff had followed his own suggestion a little more. This is a good film, but not a great one. Braff shows some real potential as a writer and director, but he needs to trust himself a little more.