When Neurotic, struggling songwriter, Catherine Brown';s life in New York City falls apart, she is forced to confront her past when she spends the summer at her childhood home in Woodstock, New York, learning that becoming successful means becoming your true self first.
Catherine's journey towards acknowledging she's no better than any of the people she silently screams at in frustrated rage becomes a pit of quicksand.
Unfortunately, Merson clutters her sometimes soulful, sensitive story with too many formulaic contrivances to impede Catherine's personal and professional progress.
The film uses its setting as lazy shorthand: for the nostalgia of lost childhood, the virtues of independence, and the spiritual purity of acoustic rock.
Jason Ritter's the best thing about the film, genuinely funny as a vapid but well-meaning fool-actor. His hysterically crying, post-sex monologues are hilarious.
The filmmakers play Catherine's disgustingly narcissistic sense of entitlement as endemic to the supposedly girl-next-door charms befitting the film's thoroughly normative gender politics.
Even by its genre's comfort-food standards, this movie feels blandly circumscribed, almost child-proofed, as if any sharper reality or wit might be harmful to the intended audience.
