'A Lot Like Love' feels a lot like life

Today's ontological question: What is Ashton Kutcher? A party boy, a girl-toy, a smirking overage pinup for the drooling underage set, or a would-be serious actor caught in a welter of lazy tics and the smog of fame?

Having missed out on working with stellar directors like Cameron Crowe and Steven Soderbergh, both of whom have turned pretty faces into real actors, the inquiring dude from Dude, Where's My Car? has largely sustained his remarkably high profile with a vulgar cable television show (Punk'd) and a babe of a certain age (Demi Moore) -- yet another celebrity without portfolio.

All this passed through my mind as I began watching the new romantic comedy A Lot Like Love, in which Kutcher stars alongside Amanda Peet, a fine young actress with a perilously long list of rotten movies to her name. But the dark thoughts didn't linger, because, as it happens, A Lot Like Love isn't half bad. And every so often it's pretty good, filled with real sentiment, worked-through performances and a story textured enough to sometimes feel a lot like life.

If nothing else, A Lot Like Love is a pleasant reminder of a Hollywood time, seemingly long gone, when boy met girl in a mid-level romantic comedy without artsy aspirations (half of Woody Allen's Melinda and Melinda) or low-brow yucks (paging Brittany Murphy).

Directed by Nigel Cole, who previously steered the ingratiating British comedies Calendar Girls and Saving Grace, and written by the actor Colin Patrick Lynch, A Lot Like Love tells the story of a would-be couple who fails to get it -- and themselves -- together time and again.

The story opens seven years ago, when Oliver (Kutcher) spies Emily (Peet) at a Los Angeles airport. Wearing a scowl and a plaid miniskirt that gives her the look of a delinquent schoolgirl, Emily seems like trouble, which makes her irresistible to the wide-eyed Oliver. Booked on the same flight to New York, the two join the mile-high club in an airplane bathroom, but while he sees their assignation as a potential beginning, she sees it as the end.

Later, the two briefly hang out in the city, even pausing next to a Manhattan bridge, in apparent homage to Allen's famous romantic comedy, then part ways, laying the foundation for a lengthy hit-and-run almost-relationship.

Structured as a series of chapters that take place at a turning point in each character's life, the story moves from seven years in the past to three years, then two, until it finally catches up to the present.

As time passes, sometimes a bit too leisurely, Oliver and Emily separately try to find themselves with different lovers and jobs. She tries to make it as an actress while he struggles to get a silly Internet diaper service (BabyRush.com) into profitability. Life goes on, but tinged with a wistful melancholy that is usually absent from American romantic comedy.

Kutcher and Peet have radically dissimilar screen styles -- she pushes you away, he pulls you in; they shouldn't make sense together. But they do, at times very nicely. Smiling doesn't seem to come easily to the spiky Peet, who brings intensity to her character and real acting chops to the film.

Unlike his co-star, Kutcher can't yet put across heavier emotions; he's still better for giggles and goofs. But the actor has enough natural charm to hold the screen without effort and, more interestingly, can tap right into a quintessential American type: the beautiful hayseed. It's a type familiar from, say, the character of Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy, and one that the actor Owen Wilson raised to an art form in Wes Anderson films like Bottle Rocket and The Royal Tenenbaums.