A guilt-edged youth

When I was 15, I would have loved this film. In fact, I probably would have loved it for some years after I was 15, up until the rigours of adult responsibility - children, mortgage, looming mortality - beat the Sorrows of Young Werther out of me. So, on the basis that it behoves all of us to keep a little nugget of our 15-year-old selves locked up in our breasts, I'm going to say this is a loveable film and that you should all go and see it to awake your inner adolescent.

This is Zach Braff 's directorial debut; and he also wrote and stars in the piece. He plays a young intern in the satirical medical drama Scrubs, and I've seen him doing it a few times when I've caught the show with my own adolescent - gulp! - kids. Braff 's a freshfaced, guileless presence on television, and this gives him the back story for the more complex character he presents in Garden State.

Andrew Largeman is a wannabe actor in LA, whose sole credit is as the retarded quarterback in a TV show about a high school football team. He makes ends meet by waiting in a chichi Vietnamese restaurant, resides in an antiseptically white apartment and has a medicine cabinet full of Lithium, Zoloft and Percocet - an unholy trinity of antidepressant medication.

The film starts with zoned-out Largeman getting a phone call from his chillingly distant psychiatrist father Gideon (Ian Holm being chillingly distant), who informs him that his mother has drowned in the bath. Largeman flies across the US to New Jersey (the garden state of the title), where he attends the funeral and meets up at the graveside with his junior high school buddy, Mark (Peter Sarsgaard), who is the gravedigger.

Largeman spends the next few days avoiding his dad and reconnecting with old friends. There's gravedigger - and graverobber - Mark; Kenny, who has made a pile by patenting a soundless Velcro; Jesse who is working as a knight at a medieval theme park - and so on.

In dribs and drabs of stoned patter, the truth about Largeman begins to emerge. His mother was a paraplegic; he himself bears an awful responsibility for this, which is why he got sent away to boarding school and hasn't been home for nine years. His psychiatrist father is heavily implicated, and the galaxy of pills his son has been taking were prescribed by him.

With the endorsement of wacky neurologist Dr Cohen (Ron Liebman), Largeman ditches the meds and comes alive. In the good doctor's reception area he meets epileptic ingénue Sam (Natalie Portman), and they embark on what I fear can only be termed a tender romance. This includes a hamster burial, a splash in the death bath, and finally a trip, with Mark, to see a beatnik dealer in antique jewellery who lives with his young family in a beached ark beside a huge gulch.

When Sam, Largeman and Mark howl into this infinite abyss, we all know that catharsis looms.

If this synopsis sounds a tad cringemaking, then rest assured, Braff 's hand is firm, and a film which on one hand could have capsized into whimsy, and on the other into a screen-based version of Friends Reunited, succeeds in holding a moderately original course.

In part, this is due to a feel for the darker shades of absurdism and a nice line in sight gags. Largeman is so zoned out he drives away from gas stations with the pipe still in his tank. At the Vietnamese restaurant, he puts on kohl along with his silken tunic. At his mother's funeral, Aunt Sylvia sings an execrable version of Three Times a Lady, accompanied on electric piano; she then gives Largeman a shirt made from the same fabric as a redecorated bathroom, so that he appears camouflaged against the clotted interior of his own adolescence.

The dialogue is snappy, with some laugh-out-loud lines, and the young cast functions well together, with a stand-out performance from Sarsgaard as the rebel building a collection of Gulf War trading cards as an investment.