At the end of Jonas Pate's forgettable Shrink, another reminder of the misfits, morons, and delinquents that inhabit the upper tiers of Los Angeles society and thus control Hollywood, the only thing that can be recalled is what a joy it is to simply watch Kevin Spacey apply his craft. The amazingly gifted character actor has found himself in some sincere duds as of late (Fred Claus, 21) but he has continued to be an enigmatic and seductive performer no matter how mediocre the material he wades through might be.

In Shrink, he plays Henry Carter, pot-smoking, booze-swilling celebrity therapist to the stars who is in the midst of a media blitz for his latest best-selling self-help tome. He is also a recent widower, his wife having killed herself before the film begins. Henry waxes therapeutic with washed-up actors (Robin Williams), spastic super-agents (Dallas Roberts), and a celebrity couple on the rocks (Saffron Burrows and Joel Gretsch) for money. But elsewhere, he shares confessions and psychological heft with his father (Robert Loggia), his best friend (Mark Webb), and his pot dealer (Jesse Plemons of TV's Friday Night Lights) for nothing more than good company and a little grass.

Henry, as it seems all seasoned therapists must be in Hollywood, is himself a head case unable to cope with the world at large without a fresh joint in hand. An early scene depicts an intervention on his behalf which he casts off sharply after reminding everyone in the room that none of their spouses have committed suicide. Their love and support won't cut it, but there is a definite uplift in the doctor's mood when he takes on new patient Jemma (Keke Palmer), a teenage cinephile who recently lost her mother to suicide. After attending a screening of the Coen Brothers' Fargo, Jemma surmises that going to the movies might be better than talking it out with Henry.

She has a point: Part of the power of the cinema is catharsis and the excising of personal or collective fantasies. Movies can cause elation and pose personal challenges and questions and, sometimes, they can do both at the same time. It's a pity then to see that Shrink can't summon the courage or talent to conjure either feeling and rather opts for the safety of predictable moralizing and benign archtypes. The script by Thomas Moffett strains to interconnect all of Henry's patients, a trick that has grown so insufferable since Renoir invented it that its very mention signals ambition over focus. Henry's best friend turns Jemma's life into a screenplay without permission; the super-agent and the washed-up actor share the same groupie; the super-agent's secretary falls for the best friend. That's not even mentioning the romance between Henry and one of his patients.

It's an impressively convoluted piece of writing, but it loses it shine when it becomes clear that neither Moffett nor Pate know where they are going with these stories. They have spent so much time and effort convincing the audience of the vast spread of coincidence and luck that they forget the individuals, and many of the characters become so exhaustively calculable that we no longer care where they end up by the time Henry hits rock bottom. But Henry, chronically unshaven, remains at the forefront of the film throughout, and Spacey's mere presence exudes a scruffy charm that eases the film's increasingly annoying sense of importance. It should go without saying, however, that having a little charm will not solve all your problems.

Grow.