At times “Anything Else” seems like the freshest Woody Allen comedy to come along since 1999’s “Sweet and Lowdown”. Its best parts are irresistibly mordant and well-observed tableaux about life in New York City, replete with jousting intellectuals who exchange sexual partners as easily as cocktail party bon mots. As usual, on this score Allen doesn’t disappoint. He’s back on familiar ground, a champion returning for a game in his home arena.

If only its best parts were its only parts. The unsettling lack of focus that sank “Hollywood Ending”, and several of his other recent efforts, creeps up on him once again in “Anything Else”. Scenes drag on too long, ‘zingers’ miss by a mile, and some of it is simply inexplicable. The scene in the Army surplus store is possibly the most excruciating in Allen’s body of work, but like the other episodes in the movie that stumble, there is an idea percolating in the background that nearly redeems it. Dobel, with his crazy, fear-mongering talk of survival, for whom even a casual flutter of anti-Semitism signals the onset of fascist death camps, is pointedly a negative influence on Falk. His paranoia has crossed a line.

This is welcome sanity. Allen wants New York to heal and move on— not without anger, perhaps, but certainly without dreams of bloody retribution. Dobel’s bad example is central to the movie’s method, which partly explains why there is so much unpleasantness that weighs down what is actually one of the more optimistic Allen movies. Dobel, Falk’s shrink, his agent (an excellent Danny DeVito), and of course his girlfriends are all a part of the madness of New York City, which Allen has always diagnosed with the apologies of a fond child making up for the sins of a deranged parent.

Here the apologies ring hollow. Somewhat surprisingly, in “Anything Else”, Allen’s hero wants true health, health as non-neurotic New Yorkers might define it, rather than the false peace of settling comfortably into his own disorders. Allen can’t resist a wicked shot at L.A. (“Idiots and losers in New York go to L.A. and become rich”, Amanda informs Falk), but for the forward progress of his career, love life, and psychological well-being it is clear that Falk must leave New York. Coming from Woody Allen this is unexpected, to say the least.

In the event, what Allen might define as ‘health’ is still anyone's guess. Uprooting Falk from his home turf turns out to be ninety minutes of a man bombarded by wave after wave of colorful New York nuttiness as he fails to move on. Jason Biggs, though he serves up a game performance that should catapult him into better roles than “American Pieties”, doesn’t sell the hand-wringing anxieties native to Allen’s script. Falk dons his neuroses like borrowed hats. He’s obviously written to have what young men his age like to call “issues”. He sees a shrink, questions the meaning of the cosmos, hems and haws about almost everything, and, well, he writes comedy. Yet nothing really rattles him. For a man who professes to love Sartre’s “No Exit”, he has a remarkably cloudless disposition.

Biggs is actually appealing because he cuts out about, oh, eighty percent of the usual cringes and tics we usually get with the Allen avatar. But there goes eighty percent of the humor as well. Granted, using a transparent facsimile (along the lines of Kenneth Branagh in “Celebrity”, who basically did a slavish impersonation of Allen) would have been more of the same Allen comedy, but underneath the superficial differences it’s pretty much more of the same anyway. Why exclude the best part?

Youth just isn’t Allen’s game. The sensibility of “Anything Else” feels all wrong—not thunderously wrong, just squirming-in-your-chair wrong (this is even truer when contrasted with the note-perfect “Lost In Translation”, with which it’s currently sharing multiplexes). When he’s not rehashing old bits from previous successes like “Annie Hall”, there’s a certain liveliness to the proceedings, but too often Allen’s writing isn’t well matched to the cast. There are moments when the actors seem to be stepping around their lines rather than delivering them.

Ricci’s role is the plum. She makes the most of what she’s given, and Allen was right to meld her wide-eyed innocence with Amanda’s feckless and unapologetic sexuality. Stockard Channing’s Paula ought to have had more screen time. Neither a true Allen crazy or a proper straight woman, she’s nothing more than dramatic conflict shoehorned into scenes that need it. Miscalculations like that doom the movie. A shame, because “Anything Else” is full of heart that tries but can’t quite escape the negativity it wants to abandon. For Woody Allen, New York has never been harder to leave.