REVIEWED - GARDEN STATE: Garden State is an unoriginal but pleasant doodle about nice young people working out their problems, writes Donald Clarke

YOUNG Zach Braff, the star of Scrubs, a TV show that manages to play on every channel without making the slightest dent in the zeitgeist, has made a living out of scrunching his brow at peculiar events happening just over the viewer's left shoulder.

This talent comes in handy for his directorial debut, which - as befits a film coproduced by those corporate sponsors of multiplex quirkiness, Miramax and Fox Searchlight - abounds in odd circumstances and bizarre personalities. Garden State's unpredictability rapidly becomes predictable, but, for those in search of sub-Hal Ashby oddballery, it should do well enough until the next Wes Anderson flick comes along.

Braff, clearly a modest fellow, plays a television actor slightly less famous than himself. When Andrew Largeman's mother drowns in the bath - look, just be grateful she wasn't trampled by an offbeat gnu or crushed by a plummeting harpsichord - the deadened young man returns home to New Jersey, where his father (Ian Holm), an ill-humoured psychiatrist, waits glowering.

Since Large, as the hero is known, left for LA, one of his friends has made a fortune marketing a silent form of Velcro. Another has found work as a knight in a medieval theme park and a third has become a gravedigger.

Understandably enough, Large is pleased to bump into young Sam, who, though she wears a strange quilted helmet to work and maintains an overpopulated pet cemetery (and so on), has a sparkling personality and the same beautiful, if disproportionately large, head as Natalie Portman. Slowly they fall in love and Large, medicated to the gills since a traumatic childhood incident, learns to grasp hold of life's possibilities.

Garden State, though it believes itself to be startlingly fresh, is, in fact, as formulaic as the average Jackie Chan film. That said, it features delicate, subtle performances throughout and, assisted by a pleasantly numb indie soundtrack, maintains an intoxicatingly mellow atmosphere.

Were a 1970s cineaste somehow beamed forward from his own time and dumped before Braff's picture, little about it - and certainly not the overpoweringly brown art direction - would strike him or her as novel. I do not mean this as criticism.