The bastard stepchild of “Garden State” and “Elizabethtown,” “The Good Half” feels too measured to work as melodrama and too mannered to be mumblecore. From the opening minutes, when Jonas lies expressionless in bed as the opening credits roll, Schwartzman coats the whole thing with a syrupy veil of melancholy, as if channeling Zach Braff on a hefty dose of Benadryl. Renn, you see, is your prototypical disillusioned white boy, a nauseatingly passive stand-in for the screenwriter’s obviously autobiographical journey. He’s an aspiring screenwriter working in L.A., fending off his boss’s advances to accept a modest promotion (“You’d be surveillance The Payroll accounting” he says) because he fears losing his dream. But of course his mother dies and he takes the first flight to his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, to take care of his family and bury them.

Renn’s relationship with his family, and especially his mother, is complicated in the way that you find in the first draft of the script. In flashbacks, we see his mother as the kind of free spirit who is fun to be with but not to be trusted: a defining memory for Renn is being left in the store while his mother stole jewelry and tried on clothes that she ended up returning. He avoided seeing his family for months while his mother wasted away with cancer, so his father (Matt Walsh), stepfather (David Arquette) and sister (Brittany Snow) are all angry with him in varying degrees. And his snarky, cynical attitude doesn’t help: Ryland feeds Renn one disgusting joke after another, and Jonas delivers them with the conviction (ironically) of a eulogy. Of course, he’s supposed to hide his grief with humor, but neither he nor his family like that, so we don’t like it either.

One of his few lifelines outside of his well-meaning but thinly spread family is Zoey (Alexandra Shipp), a quirky girl he meets on his flight home, and they exchange opinions about whether or not all ’90s action movies are masterpieces. She’s the kind of Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype you’d think we’d left behind in the late 2000s, and yet here she is with her infectious personality (she’s so nice that morning she finds two new best friends who join her for karaoke) and oh-so-charming quips (e.g. referring to her current location as “the land of Cleve”). She is also a therapist, thus doing double duty as Renn’s romantic And emotional support. She is literally tailor-made in the script to fix him, and beyond that, Shipp is given little to do.