No more 'happythankyoumoreplease'

'happythankyoumoreplease," the oh-so-cutely titled young-adult comedy from Josh Radnor ("How I Met Your Mother") doesn't quite resemble commercial television. It resembles commercials on television -- specifically, the kind of glib, facile advertising that uses emotional shorthand to hijack the viewer's attention/response/money.

Fortunately, TV ads go on for a minute. "happythankyoumoreplease" goes on for a hundred. And it doesn't provide anything more substantial than that last plug you saw for McDonald's or Cialis.

The movie posits Sam Wexler (Radnor) as a promising writer who can't quite get it together, narratively or romantically. All but dismissed by a prospective publisher (a cameo by Richard Jenkins), and run out on by his latest girlfriend, he's on the subway when he sees a little kid get separated from his handlers by a crush at the train doors. Having nowhere to turn, apparently -- like a cop, or New York City Children's Services -- he takes Rasheen (Greenlawn's Michael Algieri) back to his apartment, perhaps so the kid can ghost-write his next book.

Malin Ackerman turns in a good performance as Sam's best friend, Annie, who is hairless (thanks to alopecia) and yearning to enter the thriving world of cabaret; Kate Mara is Mississippi, a bartender who makes an unorthodox arrangement with Sam and seems to be around so she can eventually say, "You lied to me!" and thus create the fabricated conflict such movies subsist on.

There's a subplot involving two friends of Sam's (Zoe Kazan, Pablo Schreiber) who can't decide whether to go to New York or LA. The feeling here was that they should just go away.