Brian (Paul Dano) is a single 28-year-old who sells luxury mattresses out of a sparsely furnished Manhattan loft. He likes to get together with his elderly dad (Ed Asner) and older brothers (Ian Roberts and Robert Stanton) at a forest cabin to drink shroom-enhanced tea and wander about the woods. And ever since he was a little boy, he’s dreamed of adopting a Chinese baby to call his own. He’s oh-so-very odd, and so too is Gigantic, a borderline insufferable trifle that dispenses quirkiness with its every gesture and breath. Apparently weaned on little more than Sundance-style indies, director Matt Aselton proves a prime practitioner of eccentric pap, from Brian’s first encounter with flighty, peculiar Harriet (Zooey Deschanel) – whose faux-adorable nickname is Happy, and who falls asleep on one of Brian’s establishment’s beds after coming to pick up a $14,000 mattress for her wealthy dad (John Goodman) – to a climactic family reunion, Chinese tyke included, in which Harriet is told that normality is an illusion right before she takes some whacks at a Muammar al-Gaddafi-shaped piñata.

Brian and Harriet fall for each other primarily because Aselton’s script (co-written by Adam Nagata) is under the impression that weirdness attracts. In terms of the narrative, such a notion holds true, though there’s little that’s attractive (or even tolerable) about these nondescript bores, who despite their crying, moping and rambling about, haven’t been conceived beyond an embryonic, idiosyncrasies-only stage. To escape the blunt blather of Harriet’s father, whom Goodman vainly attempts to embody as a larger-than-life caricature of kooky affluence, Harriet nonchalantly asks Brian “Do you have any interest in having sex with me? Now?” It’s a providential proposition for Brian, given that his active efforts to adopt a foreign child make him something like the anti-Viagra, and he thus readily agrees. Away the two go to dad’s station wagon to get it on, thus initiating a romance that soon involves torpid cutie-pie banter, Harriet anxiously puking in a bathroom, a break-up, and a final reconciliation that – given the duo’s inability to exude anything other than self-conscious indie-kid coolness – strikes one as more tragic than uplifting.

Aselton’s direction expresses Brian’s detachment from his surroundings (and Harriet) through lifelessly studied compositions. Just as his visual style is frequently inert, his leads’ performances are lethargic, with Dano’s somnambulistic routine accentuating the fact that Brian is a cipher posing as a real person, and Deschanel’s kooky, off-center shtick so self-satisfied and, at this stage in her career, so hackneyed that everything she says or does registers as phony. Gigantic’s central romance is paper-thin, and feebly complemented by meandering digressions like the aforementioned drugged-out family gathering and a business meeting between one of Brian’s siblings (Roberts) and Japanese executives that takes place at a massage parlor where they’re all receiving “happy endings.” Along the way, metaphors compete for attention, with the drowning rats of Brian’s scientist friend eventually ceding ground to a mysterious homeless man (Zach Galifianakis) who periodically stalks, and then viciously pummels, Brian. Unsurprisingly, he’s the film’s most relatable and empathetic character.