A lot of effort was expended to ensure that Chaos Theory would look more interesting than your typical North American life-­crisis comedy. It’s smartly lit and meticulously composed, with spaced-out visual rhymes that suggest director Marcos Siega (Pretty Persuasion, Underclassmen) possesses a heretofore disguised cinematic sensibility. One wishes that the same care had been lavished on the soundtrack.

The centrepiece scene of this atonal but intermittently affecting film finds efficiency expert Frank Allen (Ryan Reynolds) in the throes of grief after a kink in his schedule occasions a blindsiding, life-changing discovery (a biological twist-of-fate that also figured into the recent Bosnian feature It’s Hard to Be Nice). Reynolds plays the implosion beautifully, but the broken-wristed strumming that accompanies his breakdown is the aural equivalent of arm-punching.

This dissonance is a microcosm of what’s wrong with Chaos Theory, which threatens to push beyond safe commercial strictures but keeps retreating to safer territory. The ads are selling it as a twentysomething’s Bucket List: the sexy, hijinks-filled adventures of a tight-ass who reclaims his lust for life by learning how to carpe diem, etc. Those elements are present, and they’re weak. But the romantic triangle at the centre of the script (filled out by Emily Mortimer as Reynolds’ wife and Stuart Townsend as his best friend) is tricky and fraught with genuine emotional peril, and if Daniel Taplitz’s script unravels what Roger Ebert might deem an Idiot Plot — i.e., characters exacerbating misunderstandings by acting like complete morons — the leads survive and, at points, even transcend the piled-up contrivances.