Butler's Cinema Scene

Keira Knightley, Chloe Grace Moretz

“LAGGIES”  My rating: D+

99 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Every filmmaker is allowed a few career missteps.

Lynn Shelton seems to have spent all hers on just one movie.

“Laggies” is…what? An unfunny comedy?  An uninvolving drama?

Whatever it is, it wastes what looks like a dream cast on a script so wretched you’ve got to wonder what all these talented people possibly saw in it.

Shelton is the indie phenom who seemed on the verge of greatness with her 2011 release “Your Sister’s Sister,” a comedy about two sisters’ relationships with the same man marked by long, real-time conversations.

Perhaps we should have taken heed when her last effort, 2013’s “Touchy Feely,” vanished without so much as a whimper.

The screenplay from first-timer Andrea Seigel centers on Megan (Keira Knightley), who a decade after high school is still adrift.

Her friends have spouses, kids and careers. Megan’s job is waving a sign to attract drivers to her dad’s tax preparation business.

She lives with Anthony (Mark Webber), a sweet dweeb who after years of dithering finally gets around to proposing marriage.But that’s too much commitment for Megan, who under the ruse of attending an out-of-town self-help seminar spends a week sleeping on the floor of the teenage Annika (Chloe Grace Moretz).

Megan had bought booze for Annika and her underage pals one night and befriended her. Hanging out with a bunch of high schoolers, it seems, is really Megan’s speed. Which is to say that she’s one pathetic young woman.

Knightley — normally an appealing performer — can’t find a way to make Megan not creepy. Plus, she appears devoid of comic timing. (Then again, Knightley doesn’t really do comedy. “Anna Karenina” is more her thing.)

Moretz, one of our more promising young actresses, fails to work up any audience empathy, not even for Annika’s desperate quest to be reunited with the mother (Gretchen Mol) who abandoned her years before.

And finally there’s the usually reliable Sam Rockwell as Annika’s single dad, the world’s hippest, most laid-back divorce lawyer. He’s dubious about this 20-something houseguest, which in the warped logic of this film means romance cannot be far behind.

Rockwell comes close to saving his scenes. But by this time, you’ll probably be obsessing about grabbing a badly needed drink once the lights come up.

What has happened to Lynn Shelton? “Your Sister’s Sister” was sharp, trenchant, witty and exhilarating in its technical derring-do, while “Laggies” is just slow, mundane and wearisome.

Let’s hope this isn’t the case, but maybe she has just one really good movie in her.