Will Donner describes life as “starting out with goodness so pure and clear you won’t even know it’s there, because that’s the way it is when you don’t know anything”. The same could be said of cinema: limitless possibility projected out into the theatre before a film becomes what it is. If we’re lucky, it blooms into something close to that romantic ideal. Other times, it becomes Waiting for Forever, and all hope is lost.

Emma and Will were childhood friends until the circumstance of his parents deaths tore them apart. Overnight, their long summers together became letters between sweethearts grown up and apart. She went on to a abusive relationship full of infidelity, living apart from a family she barely recognised. He grew up to be a clown; it’s a funny old world, and so it goes. Less so the story of that boy following his girl across the country, from Massachusetts to California, without so much as a word between them for 20 years. That’s less common. But then, Will isn’t most people.

No, if Will is anything, then I would liken him to a malignancy on the jugular of cinema: an odious void of a man, so intolerably earnest as to recall Jesus incarnate, resurrected this day to walk the streets of downtown Pennsylvania looking for souls to save. He is a cotton-candy clown whose obtuse naiveté (“Everything’s peachy!”) is so insurgent that it would be performance art worthy of Joaquin Phoenix if only the story were to hint at his bearing an affliction of some kind. Since it doesn’t and he isn’t, we’re left to conclude he is this dim-witted by choice, and really are stuck with the gold-hearted doofus for a whole 90 minutes. Heaven help us.

Will hitchhikes back to his childhood home, and along the way enraptures his ride with homespun stories of that sweet girl he lost; how he silently followed her, unable to pluck up the courage to say anything. He confesses to “breathing her in; inhaling her”, so you’ll forgive the elderly Samaritan at the wheel a double-take to check he hasn’t picked up the Perfume murderer. The act doesn’t let up when he reaches his destination either, and no sooner does he arrive home than he cranks up the mugging imbecile act for his brother’s children. A wealthy family man, Jim watches the ensuing performance with a palpable look of disdain. He has little time for Will’s wailsome love quest, and wonders aloud the chances of his securing a job that doesn’t involve farce or balloon animals. Working for an investment bank, you might ask the same of him.

Emma, pretty but dour, is halfway to nowhere in particular by the time we catch up to her. Upon her own arrival back in town, she finds her father suffering from an ailment that is end-stage terminal only when convenient: he’s introduced as being too weak to shift from his slumber, yet finds the energy to not just confront Emma’s knuckleheaded boyfriend, but reduce his own wife to tears in a volley of abuse. Their relationship is volatile to the point of bi-polarity, an incoherent experiment in Cubism that is ridiculous even in written form, so you can well imagine what it’s like in motion. Aaron – the boyfriend – waits downstairs to brood like a man with something to say, but all I could really glean from his chiselled facade is that favourable lighting might have him mistaken for Timothy Olyphant. More than that, I couldn’t fathom.

The two guys make their case for the girl in the middle, and the chips fall where they may. Will’s final plea rests on the notion that he’d rather have a chance of seeing Emma than not: a trite, self-evident truism that tells us everything about a character we cannot understand, refuse to like, and are desperate to leave behind. Writer Steve Adams – whose relation to the late Kurt Vonnegut must be a source of deep shame for the entire family – leaves this coming-of-age tale bereft of anything approaching romance, and plucky Rachel Bilson knows it too: as Emma, she is every bit as withdrawn and colourless as her co-stars, who count Blythe Danner and Richard Jenkins amongst them as the quarrelsome parents unable to imagine what would compel their characters to do anything this story asks of them.

As the unfortunate lead, Tom Sturridge is forced into a self-consciously quirky and unbearable Raymond Babbitt routine here, and for his insufferable turn alone, Waiting for Forever would likely rank amongst the year’s worst. When it’s coupled with endemic condescension, inexplicable motivations and lifeless direction, the only question that remains is whether the same couldn’t apply to just about any year. If these words seem mean-spirited, then they are only the fitting response to a film quite offensively deficient in life, love or interest. I guess you could say I’m feeling pretty fucking peachy about the whole thing.