Prints of Sleepwalking should’ve been stamped “Destroy After Sundance.” With its mood of unrelieved misery, slumming stars striving to seem authentically downtrodden, militantly drab look and musical score of plaintively plucked guitar strings, it’s a textbook example of a certain strain of contemporary American filmmaking: the worthy indie drama. Like most such movies, it involves name players both in front of the camera (Woody Harrelson, Dennis Hopper) and behind it (star Charlize Theron also served as co-producer). And like all but a few of its ilk, Sleepwalking flounders as soon as it leaves its natural home, a Park City auditorium full of film-biz folks eager to congratulate themselves for their involvement with something so adamantly non-commercial.

Theron is in trashy mode as Jolene, a flighty single mom in a wintry northern California town who leaves her rightfully peeved daughter Tara (Anna Sophia Robb) in the care of her slow-witted uncle James (Nick Stahl). Things go from bad to worse then worse again for this broken family — you know the situation will not improve when Hopper shows up.

Working from a script by Zac Stanford (The Chumscrubber), director Bill Maher (not to be confused with the former Politically Incorrect host) plots the safest route through material that might’ve been improved if the film’s aesthetic been more austere or more gothic. The most effective moments — like a dreamy scene of Tara at a motel pool, the movie’s only splash of colour or pleasure — don’t alleviate the deadening sense that watching this is somehow supposed to be good for you.