You’ve heard of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, that stock character from relationship comedies, pioneeringly identified by film writer Nathan Rabin: she’s bubbly, scatterbrained, pretty-but-not-too-obviously-sexy and there to make the sensitive male lead gain some emotional literacy. Well, this intensely annoying film – almost radioactive with its own indie self-love – is a Manic Pixie Dream Movie. It’s got a Manic Pixie Dream Guy, a Manic Pixie Dream Brother, a Manic Pixie Dream Wife, some Manic Pixie Dream Kids and a Manic Pixie Dream Grumpy Grandpa. Potential sparks of comedy are swamped in quirkiness and phoney-baloniness.

Director and star Zach Braff has co-written the screenplay with his brother Adam and the plot looks horribly like an indulgent working-through of their own issues and lives, reconfigured into an unstarry ordinariness. Braff plays Aidan, a struggling wannabe actor whose money worries mean taking his adorable, backtalking kids out of an expensive private Jewish school; his wife Sarah (Kate Hudson) earns the money; his cantankerous dad Gabe (Mandy Patinkin) is very sick and his estranged brother Noah (Josh Gad) is a Comic-Con nerd who lives in a trailer. All the cute scenes and montages, leading inexorably to redemption and reconciliation, could have been generated by screenwriting software.