(500) Days of Summer seems to aspire to nothing less than reinventing the typical romantic comedy. It doesn’t subvert the form or offer some sort of deconstruction. Instead, it seems to want to take something familiar and dose it with indie cred, finding different ways to tell the story, through a fractured timeline and fanciful digressions. The boy meets the girl, the boy loses the girl. There just also happens to be music by The Smiths playing the background. It tries so hard, earnest and anxiously, to be romantic and smart and just a little different, like a 21st century Annie Hall. It comes up short, oddly not ambitious enough to realize its ambitions.

Even in that compromised state, it makes for a far more enticing prospect that any number of manufactured options cranked out by the big studios. There are at least attempts to unearth something unique and insightful about the way that people grapple with attraction and love. And there is abundant charm in evidence from the two leads, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. Gordon-Levitt plays the smitten soul who’s spent his whole life pining for the one true that he know awaits him. It’s also hinted that he’s fallen easily and often for different candidates, and Gordon-Levitt lets some undercurrents of that neediness and tremulous insecurity show in his performance. Mostly, though, his portrayal tilts towards open-hearted likability, making him a surprisingly effectively onscreen partner for Deschanel, who imbues Summer with an intoxicating adorableness. When she sweetly asks “Do you like me?” outside a bar after a Friday night office outing, it’s hard to imagine the target of her question answering in the negative.

The movie has some real vibrancy when it stays with these two. Unfortunately, Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber fill their screenplay with a lot of spare business–artificially colorful pals, a painfully precocious little sister who dispenses relationship advice–that first-time feature director Marc Webb doesn’t have the sense to downplay or excise altogether. The strength of the film exists between the two principles, the rest is just clutter.

There’s one other key example of a lack of a prudent editorial eye causing damage. The film opens with a title card providing the familiar notice that the film is a work of fiction, not based on any real people. The second title card delivers a joke, ironically implying that one particular female may very well be the inspiration for the work. The third title card adds a hostile, one-word invective that hangs like a specter over the rest of the film, coloring some of the scenes that follow with a tint of misogyny. The film nicely captures the way emotions can be so mercurial when love is having its way with a person, but when the anger manifests in fairly understandable ways, it sometimes feels too much like an echo of that earlier title card statement of anger and pain. (500) Days of Summer may have its issues, but the general spirit of it is warm and giving enough that it makes that element an especially unfortunate distraction.

(Posted simultaneously to “Jelly-Town!”)