From years of plays and musicals on- and off-Broadway, Michael Mayer’s unfamiliarity with film directing shows, although the fault can be laid somewhat on Michael Cunningham’s script from his own "gorgeous prose" 1990 A Home at the End of the World. At first “absolutely convinced that [his] story couldn’t be told in two hours,” the novelist actually wound up with a sensible, even shorter running time. But the picture begins to seem much longer than its hour and thirty-five minutes, when the last several episodes drag.

Perhaps the first-time film director simply lost control, or the screenplay did, for the quietly resigned resolution is too little, too late. Whatever the cause, however, and whatever fidgeting there may be, the movie is good enough for its first hour-and-then-some, in great measure because of laid-back terrific acting all around.

The soundtrack is mainly ‘60s-‘70s in this unusual look at love and family strung together through Bobby Morrow and, less, Jonathan Glover. At age nine, the former (Andrew Chalmers) idolizes teenage brother Carlton (Ryan Donowho), who instructs him in life’s possibilities and in sex, turns him on in the cemetery with a half-tab of “windowpane” -- “I’m ready to come home now” -- and dies at his feet in a horrible accident out of left field.

Now sixteen and motherless for a year, Bobby (Erik Smith) befriends adolescent-faced, braces-wearing Jonathan (Harris Allan) and turns him on, too. The shaggy-haired boy is unofficially adopted into, and adopts, his new friend’s family, even cajoling Jonathan’s game but vaguely disappointed mother Alice (Sissy Spacek) into enjoying marijuana and dancing with him. When she in turn stumbles across the almost-brothers’ teenage homosexual relationship, she can only think to teach Bobby to bake pastries, her personal refuge from troubled emotions.

Still a heterosexual virgin at twenty-four, at loose ends as a baker in their hometown Cleveland -- location filming was really in Toronto -- Bobby (Colin Farrell) telephones Jonathan (Dallas Roberts), now an art designer living in the 1982 mixed-bag East Village. Invited to New York, he lives with his high school friend, who unobtrusively cruises for men, and his roommate, kooky, blue-and-bright-red-haired free spirit hat maker Clare (Robin Wright Penn).

The delicate balance will grow too fragile once Bobby moves into Clare’s bed, so Jonathan ups and lights out for his parents’ retirement home outside Phoenix. Mr. Glover’s (Matt Frewer) death reunites them all, and, Clare now pregnant, the threesome buys and renovates a farmhouse near fabled Woodstock and operates a successful Home Café. A handful of token bits of work -- painting, baking, using high-heels to make seed-holes -- is unconvincing, but, after all, there is always Clare’s inheritance.

All appears fine but isn’t quite so. Visiting to meet virtual granddaughter Rebecca, Alice speaks of women settling for less, of horizons shrinking around them, and Clare is not pleased at becoming “wife and mother” while the “Daddy I and Daddy II” in her life dance on Manhattan rooftops or country porches. She admires her immediate physical partner’s touch with the baby and ability to live anywhere, call it home, and do anything -- “[I couldn’t] be alone,” he adds -- but unvoiced dissatisfaction lurks.

Generations come and go: parents and children, friends and lovers unite and separate in age-old dance, ashes are scattered and arrangements discussed for future deaths, but, made worthwhile by memory and affection and anticipation, bittersweet life will continue.  It is so complicated -- and one wishes Jonathan’s facilely imagined fate were omitted -- with spoken words and feelings simply insufficient, as the actors fine-tune their rôles. Spacek rose to notice playing fifteen-year-olds in her mid-twenties and is mature and sure at fifty-four; seventeen years her fellow Texan’s junior but older than her two men, Wright Penn wins as talky sensitive Clare, and a becomingly laconic Farrell also stands out among this thoroughly good cast in what is a story that rests squarely on character rather than event.

(Released by Warner Independent Pictures and rated “R” for strong drug content, sexuality, nudity, language, and a disturbing accident.)