In its opening moments, Me And You And Everyone We Know unwittingly predicts what happens in the rest of the movie. Over a still photograph of a beach where two people stand and regard a sunset, Miranda July’s voice booms out, projecting vows of love and endearment onto the couple; the rest of the movie follows suit, as July attempts to pump sincerity and conviction into similarly unconvincing, stiff characters and situations, except these ones move and breathe and pretend to be real members of the human race. Alternately annoying and intriguing, the film is ultimately more of a still photo.

To her credit, July has enough of a technical team behind her to make sure that the movie is technically up to snuff: good looking, smoothly edited, and all the rest. In keeping with 2005’s cinematic trend of Children Far Less Annoying Than You’d Expect (exemplified recently in Nobody Knows, Millions, and Dakota Fanning’s surprisingly appropriate—previously freaky—precociousness), it also has some fine child actors to go along with the equally OK adult cast. But all characters, save one, suffer from the often arbitrary quirks imposed by their creator.

That one exception is a shoe salesman (Hawkes) just coming out of a bad divorce; July is introduced first, and then, with no explanation, we cut to his house, as his wife leaves. It’s clear that the two are lost souls meant to be together—in some ways, Me And You is as predictable as any Hollywood romance—and it’s equally clear that the real story will be the bumps in their journey. This being an indie romance, the complications arise from their mutual awkwardnesses and mundane circumstance, rather than the kind of over-the-top complications that arise when someone tries to convince us that gorgeous movie stars might not tear each other’s clothes off right this second. Hawkes exemplifies, more or less, the only incursion of the real world in this movie: His weirdly-mustachioed, frustrated but trying father is consistently moving.

But then there’s the rest of the cast. Like the son who gets two successive blowjobs from neighborhood girls who want to find out who’s better at fellatio. They specify what they need before they get started (a wet and dry washcloth, candy to clear their mouths, etc.), and he rushes into another room and prepares an elaborate tray for them, a freakishly well-organized assembly. The movie is full of such OCD displays—the girl next door has a collection of domestic appliances, all of which she’s already arranged in a mental layout of her future house—and you know what that’s about. July is, both in real life and in the movie, a performance artist, so she’s constructed a movie full of people just like her, people whose real talents are small and weird, who transform daily tasks or mundane dreams into elaborate, carefully executed rituals. It’s all art!

Unsurprisingly, Me And You feels frequently sealed off from the real world, though it boasts a potentially fascinating subtext about the necessary drudgery of day jobs. July frequently interrupts her modest projects to drive the elderly around, and Hawkes works as a shoe salesman at the mall. Both are good at their jobs (unlike, say, Thora Birch in Ghost World, another defiant outsider-in-training), which is refreshing for a movie that values quirky misfits. They don’t dig the work, but at least they do it competently. But July seems more interested in their uninteresting quirks, and the movie plays like the answer to a bizarre series of hypotheticals (What if the two teenage girls on the corner suddenly gave you a blowjob? What if the little girl next door dreams of buying a variety of kitchen appliances? What if someone set their hand on fire to commemorate, ceremonially, a divorce?).

What’s more surprising is how mundane July’s life lessons turn out to be. For a would-be adventurous film, it’s frequently content to traffic in platitudes, mostly courtesy of July’s only visible passenger, an old man who regularly says things like, “No one’s gonna live life for you,” and ruefully observes that, “Maybe I needed 70 years” to be ready for his new, senior citizen girlfriend. These are sentiments worthy of Lifetime, not a veritable Tourette’s assembly of tics and neuroses. July’s movie is carefully designed, with echoes of other narrative strands in almost every scene (she even finds time to work in a museum with an exhibition on “Shock And Awe,” a covert anti-war statement). But Me And You has no larger agenda; in the end, it’s just one woman’s mostly unconvincing, and not especially compelling, vision of the world.

—Vadim Rizov