A young man lies on an unkempt bed studying the ceiling or is found moping about city streets forlornly. You guess that his thoughts consist of minute examinations of his worthlessness or loneliness, or life's brutality and brevity, and you'd be right. But his internalized grocery list of grievances is never delivered in his voice. Happily for record producers, the young man's messages are mediated by the Dandy Warhols, Jeff Buckley and Coldplay. It's the inner monologue as "various-artists soundtrack," and it's a staple in a raft of recent "lost man-boy" films that seem to be on the verge of constituting a sub-genre.

The rules of this genre are basically that a sensitive, misunderstood young fellow must make his lonely way through the world until love, that fabled alembic, transforms life into a song by Frou Frou. The progenitor of the movement is Mike Nichols' The Graduate with its score of Simon and Garfunkel songs, most of which were already in existence (presciently, Nichols stressed to Paul Simon that he wanted the music to serve as Benjamin Braddock's "inner voice"). Recent examples have been Burr Steers' Igby Goes Down and Zach Braff's better Garden State (both share an emotional attachment to Coldplay's "Don't Panic"). Now we are confronted with Cameron Crowe's deeply superficial Elizabethtown, a film that is only an expensive advert for a compilation CD.

Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom) finds his life sidetracked after a futuristic tennis shoe that he's developed flops, losing his company (Nike?) millions of dollars. After a dressing down from his boss Phil (Nike!), Drew believes that suicide is his only option. Beyond this point it will certainly be the audience's. Suddenly dispatched to claim his father's dead body in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, Drew meets a free-spirited airline stewardess Claire Colburn (Kirsten Dunst), who joins him on a journey, to the strains of Ryan Adams and Tom Petty, to explore all the generic landmarks of a Hollywood lost-man-boy-meets-girl flick.

Claire becomes his guide back into life, not to mention into the intricacies of Kentucky culture; she's a muse who will eventually succeed in constructing a compilation CD within a compilation CD.

That Bloom and the insufferable Dunst have no chemistry between them is only one of the film's handicaps. Bloom's acting runs the gamut between birch and pine, suggesting to the less charitable that he might have suffered peroxide poisoning as Legolas Greenleaf. Dunst's clockwork coyness and charm grates as usual.

Crowe's screenplay is built from so much packing, possessing a verbal incontinence that leads us to no less than three endings for the film. Just as we're grabbing coats and rooting for umbrellas to flee, we notice that film is still spooling forth, only to achieve yet another ending some 15 minutes on.

Drew faces some challenging choices throughout. Should his father be buried in his blue suit? Should he remain true to his mercenary girlfriend who dumped him back in Oregon? Is the flotsam companionship of his Kentucky cousins enough, and should he reconsider driving a meat knife into his chest? What does Elton John have to say about this, or the Hollies, for that matter?