Starring Keira Knightley, Sam Rockwell, and Chloë Grace Moretz. Rated PG.

What happens when you give an indie filmmaker Hollywood money? Often, you get something like The Skeleton Twins, in which the art-house sensibility, while evident, is smothered by a thoughtless eagerness to entertain. In the oddly named Laggies, Keira Knightley—who recently starred in the similarly frustrating Begin Again—plays Megan, a Seattle woman pushing 30 and still dithering about what she’s going to do with her life.

Her contemporaries are all settled down, and she’s already been living for about a decade with her high-school sweetheart (Mark Webber) and his comb-over. From what we see, the whole gang seems like a major drag, and Megan’s impulse to ditch them is highly understandable. But the film’s screenplay, by first-timer Andrea Seigel, is curiously ambivalent about Megan’s ambivalence.

Former mumblecore director Lynn Shelton (Humpday, Your Sister’s Sister) has also handled episodes of Mad Men and New Girl, and she brings enough narrative zip to the proceedings to make up for lapses in character integrity. (She also shoots Seattle as Seattle, refreshingly, although the movie is nothing special to look at. And Ben Gibbard’s electric-guitar score is conventionally schlocky, in its tell-you-what-to-feel-now way.)

Knightley, who invests her underwritten part with genuine feeling, picks up much of the slack. Her American accents have sometimes been iffy, but here it successfully separates Megan from her more haughtily self-confident Brit characters; it also helps provide naturally appealing rhythms when she accidentally bonds with the decade-younger Annika (Chloë Grace Moretz), whose emotional age and place she relates to. Turns out that Annika’s dad, slightly oversold by Sam Rockwell, is a newly single divorce lawyer (get it?), having been dumped by his flighty ex, played by Gretchen Mol in one effective scene.

This is okay stuff, but what’s really disappointing is that, as in every other domestic comedy made by white men in Hollywood, the female characters are, in the end, defined by the male company they keep. Personal dreams and talents are alluded to, briefly, but why worry about all that if you can find just the right guy?