Stateside

So unexpected and unpredictable and so full of tiny grace notes that its ultimate collapse seems almost irrelevant.

Anselmo, basing his script on a true story, juggles more plots than a full season of "The O.C.," setting his cast adrift in a sea of soap-opera bubbles.

This has its moments--most of them thanks to Kilmer and Joe Mantegna as the boy's abusive father--but the troubled romance is unconvincing and the big-name actors hang on the story like ornaments on a spindly tree.

The finely observed moments in Stateside accumulate little emotional power. The promise of something startling and compelling goes unfulfilled, and the arc of the central love story isn't interesting enough to sustain the drama.

It's hard to know which is more annoying: The fact that writer-director Reverge Anselmo makes Dori's schizophrenic look like little more than a cute, sexually available lush or that he makes Mark's Marine act like a jarhead with nothing inside except fireflies.

Writer-director Reverge Anselmo has created a movie of ineptness so perfect and unified as to boggle the mind.

An unsalvageable mess.