Leland is a sensitive teenaged savant who murders a boy with learning difficulties in order to spare him the cruelty of the big bad world. "Why'd you do it, Leland?" asks the news reporter outside the courtroom. "Because of the sadness," replies Leland, and then proceeds to expand on his theory in a lengthy confessional, handwritten in his cell and narrated in the halting, zonked-out delivery of a sixth-form poet. "Maybe there's a why in there somewhere," he concludes at the end, and maybe there was - although by that point I was too wearied of Leland to feel his pain or smell his rainbow or whatever other response writer-director Matthew Ryan Hoge was trying to chivvy out of us.

What a sanctimonious, hand-wringing bore of a film this is. Lead actor Ryan Gosling, so good in 2001's The Believer, is flat-out terrible here, playing Leland with a roll-call of wonky gazes, wise asides and placid smiles that's straight out of the Robin Williams school of spiritual oddballs. Elsewhere, the big casting revelation comes with the appearance of Sherilyn Fenn in the role of a maternal, middle-aged housewife. Forgot the cliche about policemen getting younger by the day. As a harbinger of time's winged chariot it's got nothing on the sight of 1990's Twin Peaks pin-up suddenly popping up as a teenager's mum.