Fiona the librarian is a free spirit. How we know this? Because she wears colorfully mismatched clothing, names her car Sacajawea and leaves free books around town in little handmade dioramas.
In Margaret Whitton’s indie romance, more an assembly of quirks than an actual story, feisty Fiona (Rachel Nichols) sets her sights on Lyman (Jackson Hurst), a handsome, taciturn college student who works nights on a highway cleanup crew and inexplicably wears his reflective orange jumpsuit all the time. But Lyman is preoccupied with another new acquaintance: a green parrot who shows up in his Airstream trailer one day, spouting an enigmatic Bible quotation.
“A Bird of the Air,” adapted from Joe Coomer’s novel “The Loop,” is at its most entertaining when the parrot does the talking. Lyman’s search for its various former owners yields no big revelations — all seem oddly unmoved when they learn the octogenarian pet is still alive and squawking.
Equally tepid is the relationship between the two human stars. Fiona’s whimsical charm will wear him down eventually, but one wishes the bird would impart to this manic pixie dream girl what it keeps telling the near-silent Lyman: “Shut up!”