E-Mail This Article to a Friend DOPAMINE

Throughout Mark Decena’s arty film, his offbeat couple Rand (John Livingston) and Sarah (Sabrina Lloyd) debate whether love is genetic machinery designed to perpetuate the species or a matter of the heart. The two meet at a bar and make a hormonal connection (thus the title), but Sarah goes home with Rand’s business partner Winston (Bruno Campos), anyway. Rand’s a computer animator working day and night to create a virtual pet (a kind of avian Furby) for a demanding client, and as fate would have it, when he and Winston roll it out to a classroom of children the next day, Sarah’s one of the faculty on hand to supervise. From there Sarah and Rand begin to date — sort of. He’s too caught up in his work and his mother’s affliction with Alzheimer’s, and she’s haunted by the child she gave up for adoption after that fateful bed hop with Winston. As pat and contrived as most of Dopamine is, the missteps by the would-be-lovers do make for compelling romance, whether inspired by heart or hormones. Decena, who co-wrote the script, has an intimate understanding of his subjects, and it resonates in the performances by Livingston and Lloyd. (84 minutes.)