Starring Jon Foster, Peter Sarsgaard, and Sienna Miller. Rated 14A. Opens Friday, April 10, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

Is there something weird in the waters of Pennsylvania? This would-be comic adventure is the second of two currently opening movies to detail the pain and pleasure of growing up in Pittsburgh during the 1980s. One stop is definitely all you need—and that stop is at Adventureland.

Based on Michael Chabon’s best-selling novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh centres on truly bland Jon Foster as Art Bechstein, an anxious preppy whose only claim to fame, and shame, is his big-time gangster father (Nick Nolte, who’s starting to look like a Francis Bacon painting).

This apple is trying to fall really far from the tree, but Artie is so timid he can’t find a path of his own. When he takes a job at a discount bookstore and is expected to sleep with his sultry boss (Mena Suvari, in her most thankless role ever), we’re asked to feel sorry for him and to laugh at her.

Things start to advance—if you call reliving the Stingo part of Sophie’s Choice a step up—when this handsome stick figure falls in with an allegedly violin-playing beauty (Sienna Miller) and her daredevil bisexual boyfriend (Peter Sarsgaard, who brings life but no more logic to the story).

First-time writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber apparently thinks he will stumble upon a point of view simply by stitching together a pastiche of familiar coming-of-age sagas (complete with idiotic first-person narration) and changing tone every few scenes. Instead, he manages to prove that it is possible to fail at being funny, sweet, maudlin, sexy, nostalgic, and (of course) edgy in 95 minutes or less.