You know the drill: Mildly visually interesting music-video director does some Björk and/or R.E.M. and/or Moby clips for MTV and DVD compilations featuring either phantasmagoric imagery or grainy naturalism with tongue-in-cheek stunt casting and then eventually gets a deal to direct an indie or studio-backed picture that has cool-boy or it-girl attached to it and meets with critical acclaim upon its Sundance-kissed festival rollout. But let’s not kid ourselves anymore: American cinema has been in a profound swamp of stink ever since music videos officially overtook TV as the filmmakers’ portal to a big-screen directing career in the U.S. Robert Altman had Alfred Hitchcock Presents; Spike Jonze had Beastie Boys. The problem is not really that they’re bringing those much derided “MTV tricks” to the venerated silver screen (which, after all, has opened many a young mind to different forms of visual expression) as much as that the ascension to feature filmmaking comes with the stretching of that sound-bite aesthetic to a 105-minute running time. Often, there isn’t the sense that the story they’re telling has been stewing in their minds for years or that they simply had to film it. Jonze, ever coasting on the ingenuity of Charlie Kaufman, seemed to have crested the wave, even receiving an Oscar nomination for his damp, ugly work on Being John Malkovich, despite not bringing a single personalized touch to any of his films. Mark Romanek (a future Mary Lambert?) went from Weezer to One Hour Photo, lending unnecessary “Kubrickian” élan to a severely idiotic stalker script. There are the Tarsems, the McGs—even the occasional revelation, Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, feels like a fortuitous meeting of the minds more than a film that Gondry simply had to make.

Mike Mills’s Thumbsucker, buoyed by inexplicable praise from Berlin and Sundance, is just the latest offender, though its offensiveness stems from its sheer innocuousness: What, another one of these “disaffected white youths who can’t find his place in the world” flicks that seems to surface every six months? Now, I hate Garden State as much as the next guy, but something about Thumbsucker seemed even more opportunistic as it chugged along on its way to the inevitable “moment of teenage clarity.” Why is it that the thirtysomething Mills feels the need to make, as his first feature effort, another angsty teen-boy meltdown pic? Certainly his “Bubble” advertisement for the Volkswagen Beatle Convertible had enough rhythmic punch to prove the guy can sync up some shots persuasively, yet even that short’s adolescent “free me from corporate land” schematics proved that he’s less head-in-the-clouds daydreamer than merely stunted youth. So as his theatrical unveiling we have a bit of tossed-off plastic recycled from every other clichéd teenage pity-fest you can imagine, just visualized with a little less panache and paced with a lot less urgency. Mills often seems at a loss as to how to portray suburbia with any sort of point of view, falling back on static tableaux to convey the “emptiness” of it all. As the debate team soul-searcher and addicted thumbsucker (could we think of a malady any more insufferably adorable or less threatening?), stringy-haired, hangdog Lou Pucci looks equally lost, but it’s difficult to blame him when having to enact some vague writer’s concept of free-floating narcissistic teen dissociation. Rounding out the cast are a few real indie no-brainers: the former overused weirdo villain aging into a caring dad role (Vincent D’Onofrio), the preening comedy sidekick cast as a square teacher (Vince Vaughn), and the slumming big-name star sending up his persona, allegedly (Keanu Reeves, as unwatchable as ever, regardless of the fact that everyone seems convinced that he here proves he’s caught on to his own lack of talent, charisma, and overall worth). Plot is filler, just a series of sad-sack gazes in between Polyphonic Spree­backed slo-mo montages.

People tend to tag films about growing up as “honest,” “genuine,” and “heartfelt,” but there’s rarely a genre that feels more prefabricated or machine-tooled. Reminiscent of Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous in its self-aggrandizing, fashion-spread idolatry of the wonder years, Mike Mills’s debut also traffics only in the most basic, shrill stereotyping. How else to explain away Justin’s parents’ own eternal dissatisfaction than to have Dad be a lapsed high-school football star and Mom (Tilda Swinton, who manages to convey all of the layers of unhappiness in one glance that the other cast members nearly break a forehead blood vessel to put forth) a dowdy nurse with dreams of screwing her favorite glamorous soap star (Benjamin Bratt, as if the film required one more B-lister)? It’s hard to relate to any of the suburban malaise when it’s this telegraphed. With no coherent point of reference other than “Suburbia is suffocating,” Thumbsucker is a slap in the face to anyone who dares to see it outside of New York and Los Angeles. Justin’s escape from his stranglehold of tract homes is, alarmingly, seen as the final solution; his silly, 64-frames-per-second 30-yard dash of freedom through Times Square in the last shot, swiftly eradicates any sense that Justin’s problems were self-made. Apparently, happiness is a matter of geography. And we get one last Polyphonic Spree music video for the road.