With its artily "amateurish" hand-lettered title and its images of a pregnant heroine and her quirky-looking male companion, the poster for "Away We Go" suggests a "Juno" for grownups, and that's not far off the mark.

Franois Duhamel/Focus Features

Maya Rudolph stars as Verona and John Krasinski as Burt in Sam Mendes' ''Away We Go,'' a tale of an unwed but loving couple who "audition" cities for their child's home.

Away We Go

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Rated R for language and some sexual matters

Length: 97 minutes

Released: June 5, 2009 NY/LA

Score: 2.0

Cast: John Krasinski, Maya Rudolph, Jeff Daniels, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Allison Janney

Director: Sam Mendes
Producer: Sam Mendes
Writer: Dave Eggers, Vendela Vida
Genre: Comedy
Distributor: Focus Features

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Both movies are self-conscious and precious and "hip," but "Away We Go" suffers in comparison because of the stuffiness that seems endemic to director Sam Mendes, who can suck the oxygen from a theater even when he sets his action on the open road. That gasping-for-air quality was appropriate to the smirky suburban smotherthons "American Beauty" and "Revolutionary Road" (movies that I liked), but here, every time you're about to laugh, a melancholy finger-picked song by Nick Drake wannabe Alexi Murdoch invades the soundtrack to warn you that, hey, this is serious. (If there's one thing I resent as a moviegoer, it's the imposition of unearned emotion through borrowed songs.)

A picaresque road movie with many very funny moments nestled within its contrived premise and among its proud, symbolic visual flourishes (a shot of a distant airplane, distorted by thick glass panels), "Away We Go" stars "Saturday Night Live" cast member Maya Rudolph and John Krasinski of "The Office" as Verona and Burt, a longtime unmarried but affectionate Colorado couple who take a road trip to "audition" cities to be the new home in which they will raise their impending first child, a daughter.

"I want her childhood to be Huck Finn-y," says the earnest and eccentric Burt, who wears a beard, mismatched plaids and horn rim glasses, and wants to take up "cobbling," although he really means whittling. The mixed-race Verona, meanwhile, worries that although she and her husband are in their 30s, "We don't even have the basic stuff figured out. ... We have a cardboard window ..."

But what's not "figured out"? Burt and Verona love each other; they're going to have a baby that they will love; they appear to have decent if uncertain careers (she's a medical illustrator who specializes in such afflictions as subdural hematomas; he's an "insurance futures" salesman). Their solipsism and supposed arrested adolescence seem unnatural, imprinted upon them by their creators, the husband-and-wife writer team of Dave Eggers (known for his acclaimed and bestselling memoir, "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius") and Vendela Vida, to enable the authors to push their two characters into an episodic kook's tour of oddball America. In fact, "Away We Go" might have worked better as a novel; the dialogue wouldn't seem so arch if we were permitted to "act" it in our heads, and the occasional monologues would seem more natural on a printed page, where words are required to fill the blankness.

Still, if you're going to film these words, you can't do much better than casting Allison Janey (Juno's mom, how about that?) as a drunken loudmouth in Phoenix ("They're screwed up out of the womb," she counsels the couple about kids), or Maggie Gyllenhaal as a trust-fund New Age professor in Madison, Wis., who suckles two children at a time (even when one is at least 4 years old) and lives in a "continuum" home where she, her moocher husband and her unfortunate children share the same bedroom. ("We practice family bed.")

The residents of other audition cities are less comic. In Montreal, Burt and Verona find two old college friends living among a rainbow assortment of adopted kids; they learn the wife (Melanie Lynskey) has had a series of miscarriages, resulting in a sadness she tries to exorcise while doing a clothed pole dance to the Velvet Underground's heartbreaking "Oh! Sweet Nuthin'" at what appears to be a karaoke strip bar for hipsters. (How many unlikely concepts are in that sentence alone?)

I think many moviegoers will be moved and touched by "Away We Go"; I expect some will declare it an instant favorite. Just as many are likely to be annoyed or frustrated, especially when the entire road trip proves to be essentially pointless. Maybe Burt and Verona really are "(foul)-ups," to paraphrase Verona; if it takes them this much effort to get to an obvious destination, how long, for example, does it take Burt to return from the market with a quart of milk?

Surprisingly (isn't this movie made to order for Midtown?), "Away We Go" is playing exclusively at Malco's Ridgeway Four.

-- John Beifuss, 529-2394