A collage of Sundance-cliché castoffs, Michael Knowles’s adaptation of Douglas Light’s novel saddles its thirtysomething hero (Hall) with the surname Bliss—and that’s just the tip of the film’s irony-telegraphing iceberg. His barely legal girlfriend (Larson) turns out to be the daughter of an old high-school pal; his hot neighbor (Liu) asks him to focus-group salsa by way of seducing him; and his best buddy (Messina) joins a cult that believes the Essex Street Market is the center of a sex-trade ring. Hall’s puppy-dog charisma holds up under the strain, but it isn’t nearly enough to keep this messy midlife-crisis dramedy afloat. A little of this Bliss goes a long way.
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