Starring Nick Stahl, AnnaSophia Robb, and Charlize Theron. Rated PG. Opens Friday, March 14, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

If all unhappy families are miserable in different ways, it is incumbent on writers—from Tolstoy on down—to particularize their situations and not let them sit there as generalized downers. In this sense, Sleepwalking adds little understanding to the growing collection of indie-film abuse victims struggling all too blandly from Bad Dad Syndrome.

The acting throughout this tale of youngsters on the run from themselves is impressive, and there are fine touches from first-time director Bill Maher, whose previous experience was in visual effects for big-budget flicks like Batman & Robin and the X-Men movies. Unfortunately, Zac Stanford’s script offers only dull, if sometimes risible, clichés, and the film is curiously underwritten even at that.

Charlize Theron, who also helped produce, appears briefly as a hard-living trailer-park type who abandons her daughter (Bridge to Terabithia’s marvellous AnnaSophia Robb) to the care of mom’s stoical-yet-sensitive younger brother, James, played by the quietly watchable Nick Stahl. After James loses his job on a construction site—where Woody Harrelson and Deborra-Lee Furness offer notable bright spots as helpful coworkers—social workers deem his crummy apartment an unfit home for the bright schoolgirl. The two then hit the Road to Possible Closure (which runs just parallel to the busier Redemption Highway).

After some generous narrative padding in the middle—the story is set in an unnamed American state but shot in bleak, wintry Saskatchewan—they end up with James’s bastard of a father, played by Dennis Hopper without the slightest trace of sympathy or surprise. It turns out that abusers do pretty much what you expect of them, and the audience can attest to that suffering more than their children can.