Away We Go drags

In theaters Friday: Amelia, Astro Boy, Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, Saw VI

New on DVD/Blu-Ray: Cheri, Imagine That, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Away We Go stars The Office’s John Krasinski and former Saturday Night Live actress Maya Rudolf as an unmarried couple in their early 30s that finds out they are going to have a baby. Set on raising their daughter in a welcoming environment and thoroughly unsatisfied with their own, near-friendless lives, they set off on a cross-country drive to find a suitable place to live and raise a family. Directed by Sam Mendes, the film takes us on a Flirting with Disaster-like road trip from Phoenix to Montreal to Miami and several points in between as the parents-to-be visit friends, relatives and former co-workers looking for friendship and support and quietly judging each on their lifestyles, either gleaning tips or sharpening their sarcastic quips based on the various couples’ various child-rearing strategies. Basically, they are interviewing for new best friends and parenting advice.

Mendes released a second familial drama last year, the knock-down-drag-out Revolutionary Road. In that, he had Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet escape their quarter life crisis by fleeing the mythical American dream for the mirage of a French one. Of course their marriage problems followed them there, too. Not because Paris is a bad place to live, but because they, individually, are the problem. With Away We Go, he showcases partners so disillusioned with life they go round and round until they are too tired to keep searching. Unfortunately this creates myopic and cloying characters that only see the external problems of the world, those unsightly surface qualities easily spotted in other people, other cities, other jobs, but harder to acknowledge and confront within ourselves.

What handicaps Away We Go is the same thing that crippled the overly self-important Garden State five years go. It is so clumsily episodic, and its lack of character arcs or any form of rhythm, suspense, tension-and-release obliterated what few nice moments and performances that lie buried within this generally humorless light drama. So little is at stake here that it comes off like a flat-lining home movie. Despite its “hand-drawn” Juno-ready advertising campaign, I was genuinely looking forward to Away We Go. But 30 minutes in I felt like I was sleepwalking through hipster hell.

I wanted Krasinski to shave his face and start being funny. Jim funny. I wanted Maya Rudolf to stop moping.

The black-and-white, new wave title cards that break up the action and announce each new city and segment of the movie were somewhat exciting, like a new beginning, but with each, the sequence that followed was a disappointment.

Only the horn-heavy exuberance of George Harrison’s “What Is Life” and the Velvet Underground’s breezily sensuous “Oh! Sweet Nothing?” gave this film momentary lifts, though the title of the latter just served to remind me that there is nothing at all resting at the center of this film; nothing but empty clichés for shallow, self-centered existential dilemmas; nothing to anchor the big “finale” when the main characters give an anticlimactic sigh of relief that harmonized with my own sigh, because, yes, it was finally over.