Mr. Jealousy

Shakespeare, Proust, Joyce, and now Noah Baumbach have weighed in on the most perverse of passions. No surprise that Mr. Jealousy, the young director's follow-up to his twentysomething debut, Kicking & Screaming, is more like Seinfeld than Othello. Bright, glib, slickly acted, and engagingly superficial, it's an amusing Woody Allen knockoff for Generation X.

Lester Grimm (a wryly melancholy Eric Stoltz, eerily resembling Conan O'Brien), is a young New Yorker who wants to be a writer but works as a substitute teacher. His major trait is jealousy: as a 15-year-old (whom we see in the film's coy, too frequent flashbacks) he spotted his girlfriend kissing a club promoter, and as a college student he spent so much time following his girlfriend's ex-boyfriend that he neglected his girlfriend and she left him. Now he's with Ramona (Annabella Sciorra, bringing an Italian-American spin to Annie Hall), a graduate art student with cute neuroses. Or maybe he's drawn more to her former beau, Dashiell (a bearded Chris Eigeman who, in keeping with the talk-show-host motif, resembles Dennis Miller), a successful writer described as "the voice of his generation."

By chance Lester spies Dashiell entering a group-therapy session. He joins the group himself, taking the name and problems of his best friend, Vince (a buffoonish Carlos Jacot). This set-up offers Lester and Baumbach the opportunity to explore the ironies and enigmas of relationships and identity, but the director proves more of a Mr. Softie in following through. He's heavy-handed in making sure everyone -- except his characters -- gets the joke, with such devices as a voiceover narrative wordier than the dialogue. Mr. Jealousy offers the genial growl of the green-eyed monster, but none of the bite.

-- Peter Keough