First time director Miranda July's quirky, touching valentine to ordinary people mines extraordinary depth as her cast of unpredictable characters goes about a dance of courtship, connection and growing up.  July, who also wrote the screenplay, plays the central role of Christine Jesperson, a would-be video artist.  By day, she tenderly drives her clients around town for Eldercab, a taxi service plus for senior citizens.  Doing more than drop her clients off at the mall door, she listens to them; she helps them shop for shoes.  The shoe department is where she encounters Richard, a shoe salesman with a quintessential bad haircut. His wife has just left him with two sons and a major dent in his self esteem. They both yearn for a little magic in their lives.

After a disturbing opening scene, in which we see Richard in an apparent act of desperate self-mutilation, lighthearted pathos descends and the motivation for his action reveals his off center loser logic. He’s a guy just trying to do the best he can, and feeling inadequate for the task. Charmed and pursued by the straightforward and persistent Christine, he’s thrown even more off guard. Obvious soulmates in some respects, Christine is Richard’s opposite in her head-on approach. She quietly makes her video tapes and is undaunted by obstacles in her path to get them accepted for a local art exhibit.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, 6-year-old Robby, watched over, sort of, by his 13-year-old brother, Peter, make friends in the new neighborhood and connects with strangers over the Internet. Uniformly cast with players well-suited to their parts, Brandon Ratcliff as Robby steals the show in every scene in which he appears as an impish innocent doing what comes naturally. Using his observations, his 6-year-old inclination to imitate, and a web chat room, his curiosity takes him into unexpected territory. Of Peter and Robby’s high jinx, dad Richard is blissfully unaware. Occupied with setting up a new life, complete with new community supports, and a possible new romance, Richard hasn’t a clue about what his sons are doing at home.

In typical kid style, they are not doing anything all that bad, and can take care of themselves better than the grownups sometimes give them credit for. One of the new neighborhood connections comes in the form of the model family who lives next door in a perfect pink cottage, and whose young daughter, Sylvie (Carlie Westerman), lives a fantasy life of conspicuous consumption as the ultimate future homemaker, her hope chest filled with carefully chosen products.  This ode to consumerism is but one of the vignettes that are almost mini-movies within the whole.  Another is the one block walk taken by Christine and Richard after their first meeting, when each point they pass is identified as a metaphor for an entire lifelong relationship.

It is Christine’s playful, vulnerable attempts at connection that haltingly propel the romance, and the movie, forward. She knows she has good things to offer, and her willingness to take risks, sometimes in the face of humiliation, is inspirational. One hilarious subplot includes Richard’s fellow shoe salesman and his infatuation with a pair of teasing teen sisters. There is something very urban and universal here, even as it defies categorization, about this milieu, and about July’s funny and careful sense of delineating the struggle against the isolation of contemporary life.