Entertainment

Sparks never catches fire

‘You haven’t written a person — you’ve written a character,’’ someone tells Calvin, the depressed novelist hero of “Ruby Sparks,’’ a twee, mildly amusing rom-com from the directors of “Little Miss Sunshine.’’

Even after Ruby magically comes to life in the form of Zoe Kazan, Calvin’s creation is still just a character — not much more than a generic form of what we film critics have come to label a “manic pixie dream girl,’’ a type that arguably reached its apotheosis when played by Zooey Deschanel in the superior “(500) Days of Summer.’’

That’s both the central joke and, as it turns out, the built-in limitation of the script Ms. Kazan has written for herself and her real-life boyfriend, Paul Dano.

PHOTOS: MOVIES OF THE MIND

Dano’s Calvin has struggled for a decade to follow up the acclaimed best seller he wrote at 19, so his shrink (Elliott Gould) suggests he pen something as a private exercise drawing on his dreams.

Even presuming that Calvin’s on libido-suppressing antidepressants, Ruby’s a curiously asexual construct for a man in his late 20s — this redhead’s got less erotic heat than the fantasy woman concocted by a pair of teen nerds in “Weird Science’’ (1985).

When Ruby suddenly turns up in the flesh, Calvin is delighted — at least until she begins yearning for an existence beyond going to the movies with her narcissistic boyfriend.

In a Woody Allen-esque twist, Calvin is able to fix that perceived flaw with a few quick keystrokes.

But he’s forced back to the typewriter repeatedly for more tinkering when she becomes too clingy, or too relentlessly cheerful, or even bipolar when Calvin tries letting her “be herself.”

Dano and Kazan are appealing actors with more onscreen chemistry than many other real-life couples.

While there are some laughs, Kazan’s script and the tentative direction of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris resolutely avoid the sharper edges of this implied critique of men’s attempts to mold their girlfriends.

What we get instead is unbearable shtick, featuring cameos by Annette Bening and Antonio Banderas as uptight Calvin’s hippie mother and stepfather, who seem to have stepped right out of a “Meet the Parents’’ sequel, and some pro-forma parody of the literary scene featuring Steve Coogan as a book agent. There’s also far too much Southern California real estate porn of the Nancy Meyers school.

The film reaches its comic high point when the frustrated Calvin decides to show fed-up Ruby how he can manipulate her behavior at the keyboard (including by forcing her to speak in French and making it impossible to leave). Like Calvin’s novel, though, this comes off primarily like an acting exercise that the film’s writer, Kazan, has invented for herself.

If Ruby were more of a person than a character, we might care more for her plight. But like Calvin, Kazan has written herself into a corner that can only lead to embracing the sappy romantic clichés that “Ruby Sparks’’ tries half-heartedly to mock.