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Quirks burden 'Me and You and Everyone We Know'

"Me and You and Everyone We Know" started losing me — and possibly you and everyone we know — when writer-director-star Miranda July put socks on her ears. She does it for no good reason, except to be cutely kooky.

Quirks are running amok in the modern independent comedy. The poster child of the disease is the happily numbskully "Napoleon Dynamite," whose stylized idiosyncracies were the very substance of the movie's cracked universe. I now enter the films of Todd Solondz ("Happiness"), Miguel Arteta ("The Good Girl") and Wes Anderson ("The Royal Tenenbaums") girded for cloying deadpan and haphazard eccentricity. And though I enjoyed "Napoleon Dynamite," as much for its purity of intent as anything, I will proceed with caution when seeing director Jared Hess' next movie.

IFC Films 'Me and You and Everyone We Know' 2 out of 5 stars Director: Miranda July Starring: Miranda July, John Hawkes, Miles Thompson, Brad Henke, Brandon Ratcliff Run time: 95 minutes Release date: June 17, 2005 Rating: R for disturbing sexual content involving children, and for language. See showtimes On the web Official movie site View the trailer    Trailers require Quicktime Rate "Me and You and Everyone We Know"   Go see it   Make it a matinee   Wait to rent   Don't bother Voter Limit: Once per Hour View Poll Results

What these films try to do, often successfully, is fashion new, weird, post-ironic worlds in which to immerse viewers Ñ a noble artistic endeavor. But they have impish motives. They want to make us uncomfortable, to shock laughs out of us, to surprise with the next subversive flourish. In distinguishing themselves from mainstream fare, they are frequently clever and interesting, but sometimes they lose sight of where they're going and what they're about. They can be coyly vacant.

"Me and You and Everyone We Know" is simple. So simple that its arty archness stands out like a neon beer sign in a church. July's award-winning debut feature — it took a prize at the Sundance Film Festival, an ambiguous honor at best — traces the human yearning for connecting with others, that painfully elusive communion of hearts, minds and bodies. The characters are a motley bunch whose individual paths cross and converge in the loose and airy way they tend to do in offbeat indie films like this.

With muted poise, July plays Christine, a shy artist who radiates the porcelain fragility of a young Mary Steenburgen or Julie Hagerty. Achingly self-conscious, both waif and naif, she has luminous skin, copper curls and enormous, pupil-less blue eyes that render her a human doll. Her unsure voice is that of a skittish girl-woman.

From afar Christine falls for department store shoe salesman Richard (former Austinite John Hawkes, now seen on "Deadwood"), who's been booted from his home by his estranged wife. He takes their sons, a somnolent teenager (Miles Thompson, embalmed in passivity) and a precocious 6-year-old (Brandon Ratcliff) who cultivates a kinky online relationship with an anonymous woman.

We are supposed to be alarmed by the boy's escapades in instant messaging, but the world July creates is too artificial and surreal for any of the odd occurrences to be affecting, let alone plausible. July wills weirdness into the story with brightly lit static shots, quiet lingering takes, deadpan acting and a Casio keyboard soundtrack. "Napoleon Dynamite" did the same thing, but its characters were meant to be bizarro riffs on high school caricatures; they belonged in their strangely foreign setting, and we weren't asked to accept it as ironclad reality as we are in July's film.

The lonely Christine all but stalks Richard, who is unsettled by the wide-eyed woman's resolve. Meantime, a pair of lusty teen coquettes practice their manipulative sexual wiles on Richard's teenage son, as well as his sadsack co-worker. The only connection these girls seek is one with their self-esteem.

July's sweet and sour film is dewy with callow optimism, which would be refreshing if it wasn't so facile. It's hard to tell if July thought through her ideas about love and loneliness and a dreamy ideal world or if they just struck her as neat. Her sunny sentiments, spoken in spongey poetics ("I would love to believe in a universe that ..."), have a hippie-dippy whiff.

July is an accomplished performance artist and short-filmmaker, and perhaps the baggy, disjointed quality of "Me and You and Everyone We Know" bespeaks a discomfort with the feature-length form. Save for Richard, July's people are cold creations with only a foot in real life. Catatonia is not an acting style, despite what the new wave of offbeat auteurs wants us to think.

A minor tragedy is that the lank, scraggly Hawkes (as Richard) is sympathetic and real, but he's patently miscast. He seems to be in a totally different, more believable film, emoting and reacting among the chronically detatched. In the age of the small, quirk-encrusted movie, that might be the point.