James Franco wrote a collection of linked short stories about growing up in Palo Alto, California: the untold violence, limitless bottles, designer drugs, prescription pills and caution to the wind sexual congress splaying this way and that which defines the sun-bathed, fantasy community of world renown. A third generation Coppola, Gia Coppola in her debut effort (who better to direct a movie about Californian angst and ennui?) adapted that novella into a movie. This is a review of that movie: that movie sucked.

Emma Roberts is April, your run-of-the-mill, somehow awkward, bikini-bridge valley girl who plays soccer, plows packs of cigarettes and has eyes for her older but sexy – in a unkempt, high school dropout kind of way – coach B, played by a scraggly and uncommonly sketchy Franco. He’s a whistleblower (literally, not figuratively) closer in kind to Humbert Humbert than Eric Taylor and his sheepish flirtations with April are just real enough to keep your daughter out of this season’s summer sleepaway camp. But like this land of the living (and oft livid) lethargic, Franco’s Mr. B is only charming to a stillborn or someone recently reanimated. His chemistry with April is no rose ceremony, it’s a Nickelodeon’s sliming.

Franco’s shown a penchant for stonerish, dead-eyed empty stares – stares on full display during his ugly 2011 Oscar hosting duties. In those empty round canyons are a kind of vacuous presumption of boyish candor that emotes stoner philosophy more than anything close to “genius”. Sometimes there’s nothing behind a blank stare save for the blankness (I mean have you read the reviews of his latest “art” installment?). That same faux-artistic tendency to fluff nothing into something is on embarrassing display here. If the Oscars are any indication of Franco charm gone horribly awry, Palo Alto hardly rights the course, chartering Franco into new coves of poopiness.

As his player/d*ckslayer, April navigates the springs below life’s great water-dump with the pointedness of a waterlily. We hardly get to know the girl outside of her penchant for feeling lonely and moping to and fro. Lest we actually grow attached to any of these characters, the story plops from one turdish storyline to the next as we meet more d-bags and hoes for us to generally not care about.

The central conceit of the movie finds April at odds with should-be beau, Teddy (Jack Kilmer) a baby-faced, is-he-or-isn’t-he ginger who shares April’s love for not caring about much. Teddy is often in hot water with the law – a character flaw exaccerbated by total loser and pejorative fuck Fred (Nat Wolff). While Fred skulks around flying his misogynist flag high, April and Teddy circle one another with the lazy stalkings of a drunken falcon – too distracted by shiny objects to find the field mouse they’re ultimately looking for. They miss and miff again and again, never on the same page at the same time, too balls deep in court-ordered community service or James Franco to connect. It’s hard to care though because, well, fuck these kids. Teddy adds blowies to his notch from a girl tipping past 11 on the hammer-scale while April’s awkwardly felt up in the hallway. It just brings back all the worst elements of high school, dunnit?

The issue (as if this wasn’t enough already) is that the character’s have all got very serious problems but keep them stuffed so deep down inside that the actor’s have very little wiggle room to emote. Coppola, like her characters, lives on autopilot heading towards hazardous trajectories – and while that might be an interesting concept to ponder from a metaphysical stance, it doesn’t make for very compelling watching. Especially with a lead like April who’s got the strength of a pussy willow and sways with every breath of wind just about as much as that naughtily-named vegetation. Again though, it’s challenging to feel bad for someone who’s already so occupied feeling sorry for themselves and does nothing to better her situation. Though the waters she traverses are brown and stinky, she still strips down to her skivvies and paddles gingerly around in them.

What transpires is a whole bunch of nothing that adds up to little more than: “Rich white people gots it ruff.” Like the offspring of someone tragically out of touch might be, Palo Alto is an off-putting blend of Hollywood melancholia that invites you to the pity party but promptly turns you away at the door when you’re not dressed in custom Versace. Appropriately, it earns about as much sympathy as a billionaire basking in despair (“But I wanted the Gulfsteam G650 in red!!!”) The project might work better on page than as a movie because self-reflection is hard to play on screen, especially with a crew of actors this… uninspiring. The sparsely intriguing moments of genuine interest are as exciting as finding a raisin in your oatmeal – it’s a slight improvement over the goopy remains but still dried-out and old before its time, like this film.