“Garden State” faithfully chronicles the comic struggles of its spiritually exhausted hero, Andrew Largeman, without really inquiring into the source of his exhaustion. Slipping into an oddball complacency, writer and director Zach Braff never presents Andrew as anything more than an empty vessel with a big heart. He borrows the soulful white boy blueprint of “The Graduate”, an obvious inspiration: a handsome, intelligent, somewhat reserved young man finds himself thrown into a fast, ugly, and unforgiving world. At first he isn’t ready for the world; by the end, the world may not be ready for him. Nothing wrong with that, but Benjamin’s disillusion sprang from the turbulent campuses of the late Sixties; why should we care about the anxieties of a struggling actor on anti-depressants?  Bald synecdochic elements (thousand-yard stare, problems with parents, trancelike indifference while standing in rain, etc.) do not a character make.

Surrounding him with a vivacious cast and giving him a nifty array of funny sitcom jokes, though, Braff manages to put his Andrew into a warm and sympathetic light. Back in New Jersey after the usual slog through the acting circuit in L.A., Andrew finds himself surrounded by friends new and old, chiefly Natalie Portman as Sam, the habitual liar next door, and Peter Sarsgaard as Mark, the hopeless slacker geek. Cute, emotionally accessible, and off-center enough to re-center the hero, these are sturdy stock characters right off the small screen. They carry on a time-honored tradition in American cinema. No matter how provincial, dumpy, and backwards your hometown is, if you leave for the big city and return years later, you will find that the town has transformed into a wonderland of understated elegance, its people into edifying paragons of humor, modesty and folk wisdom.

The movie’s soul is thumbtacked on like a kindergarten drawing pinned to a refrigerator door. A film that trafficks in naivete and simplicity certainly has its charms. But Braff ought to have used more subtlety. Wes Anderson’s “Bottle Rocket” covered the same ground by using a heist plot that was more Tom Sawyer than Al Capone. Instead, Braff’s message is writ Largeman, as when, for example, he evokes Nietzsche’s soul-affirming abyss by bringing his hero to—of all places!—an actual abyss. Later, Andrew solves the problems with his father simply by cornering him and belting out a speech that sounds so on-the-money it could have come from a “relationship expert” on a daytime talk show. By the time he boards a plane for L.A., is there any real fear that a tearful Sam will leave the airport alone?

Braff’s touch is lighter with the comedy, and those thin sitcom characters come to the rescue. Together the excellent cast embodies the endearingly childlike core of “Garden State”. The title, of course, is a pun. The “Garden State” is not only New Jersey, Andrew’s home, but a “garden state”—a state of innocence, childhood, Eden. Braff skillfully redeems the film from Andrew’s taciturn navel-gazing with sharply written, often inspired comic episodes, such as the wallpapery shirt a family friend makes for him, Sam’s pet cemetery, the bow-and-arrow game (Portman tugging her ear is the film’s best moment), and Mark’s Gulf War Trading Cards. Braff knows his bread and butter is airy comedy, and “Garden State” triumphs because it refuses to allow the metastasizing of its flimsy self-importance.