Ultimately promising more than it delivers, Lucky Them remains amiable as it meanders through one woman's middle age meltdown. And what it looses in purpose it makes up for with light-hearted loopiness that almost gets the story across the line. Almost.

Toni Collette (The Dead Girl) is Ellie, a music critic for struggling, Portland based magazine, Stax. She lives with two seahorses called Kurt and Courtney and the painful memory of ex-lover/musician Matthew, presumed dead. On the anniversary of his seminal album, Ellie's editor (Oliver Platt - Frost/Nixon) dispatches her to write about Matthew's disappearance which she does, reluctantly, and enlists the help of another ex-lover, the erratic and frankly weird Charlie (Thomas Hayden Church – Sideways). Lucky Them is part character study, part detective story, part road movie; a complex mix that doesn't make for a convincing whole.

Collette is the film's star attraction as she gives Ellie a reckless, boozy, cougar-ish exterior which wraps a marshmallow centre that has never come to terms with being abandoned by Matthew. It explains the attraction to dishy Lucas (Ryan Eggold - 90210), the new kid on her musical block. Likewise the partnership with quirky Charlie. It's in this context that the film is at its best, building troubled characters that wouldn't be out of place in an Alexander Payne movie.

Yet that's about where it stops. The screenplay by Huck Botko fails to take these characters anywhere particularly illuminating, and does so by the most circuitous means possible. Director Megan Griffiths adds to the sense of aimlessness by emphasising support characters who don't lend much support, and by allowing Charlie's weirdness - an acquired taste – to overwhelm most scenes he's in. It tears at the film's own sense of realism (which is nominal at best) while heightening an uncertainty of tone that permeates the story.

Although the film's payoff is delicately handled, there is little in the way of surprise about Lucky Them and by the end you're simply left wondering what all the fuss was about. Deeper themes of grief, self destruction and self determination are given over to quirk and easy emotion. Griffiths teases out some humour and drama along the way, and Collette is always a pleasure to watch, but unfortunately it's just not enough to turn this thin conceit into the fleshy delight it promised to be.

// COLIN FRASER

Previewed at The Reelroom, Sydney, on 23 February 2015