A directionless Jake Gyllenhaal and his fiancée called it quits months before her senseless murder, but neither of them broke the news to her parents (Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon). After the funeral, Gyllenhaal lets Hoffman take him in as a junior partner in a real-estate scheme. He also meets cute with a free-spirited postal worker (Ellen Pompeo) who must have had an unorthodox education (she knows what "escrow" means but is unfamiliar with the term "commercial real estate"), and the two fall in love.

This wispy counterculture soap opera is set in 1973, for no better reason than to assemble a party CD’s worth of songs not often heard in multiplexes. On writer/director Brad Silberling’s booby-trapped set, a person can’t back into a shut-off radio without activating the intro to Jethro Tull’s "Aqualung." For a while, the film’s mysteriousness about where it’s going works in its favor: you watch for a whole hour before Moonlight Mile collapses into bathos. But when it collapses, it collapses hard. As half-realized emotional issues get talked out at length, and as the characters come to terms with Silberling’s diluted life truths, the movie’s glibness and dishonesty become excruciating. (117 minutes)