Whatever chemistry they may have had during their real-life romance, glassy-eyed man-child Elijah Wood and fleshy Teutonic muse Franka Potente don't really generate sparks onscreen. That's just one of the many problems that afflict this cutesy coming-of-age yawner, which hits every indie-cliché pothole imaginable on the road to its pat wish-fulfillment finale. Dream sequences as woodenly symbolic as freshman-year love poetry pop up frequently in the imagination of Jones, Wood's little-boy-lost protagonist, as if to insist that the script's treacly fantasy of collegiate self-discovery is actually a hard-hitting exposé. Meanwhile, the cast's talents are wasted on characters that are either underwritten (Elizabeth Perkins as Jones' incessantly sardonic mom) or overwritten (Deborah Harry's embarrassingly over-the-top saleswoman/seductress). The forcibly quirky bit players, including a gay cowboy and a pair of Oedipal hillbillies, exist as either cheap punch lines or convenient plot devices whose sole function is to help Jones "find himself" and learn "it's OK to be different." Pop starlet Mandy Moore is convincing enough as a talentless would-be thespian with stars in her eyes, but she's just playing to expectations. Novice screenwriter Charles Kephart and first-time director Jeffrey Porter were virtually unknown at the time, but we might have expected better choices from the usually stellar Wood and Potente.