"You’ve got to lighten up a little bit," Kirsten Dunst says to Billy Bob Thornton midway through this humorless, awful movie. It’s the only true note struck in writer/director Ed Solomon’s leaden script. Thornton stars as Manuel, a staring zombie who’s tossed out of prison after serving 23 years for the hold-up killing of a convenience-store clerk. After a short spell of not knowing what to do with his freedom, Manuel finds his calling preaching to inner-city kids who’re serving under community-service sentences. He also stalks and woos the sister (Holly Hunter) of the person he killed.

Levity is a compendium of five or six different redemption melodramas, among which it’s hard to pick the most cliché’d and unbelievable, though the nadir of offensiveness is reached with the apparitions of Manuel’s angelic victim. Dunst (wasted here) plays a character described in the press notes as "a beautiful and privileged wreck of a young woman." The movie is something of a beautiful and privileged wreck itself, thanks to its only commendable feature, Roger Deakins’s cinematography, which would have come off as less overwrought in a film less tepid and pretentious. (100 minutes)