Last night I was at a preview screening Away We Go, the new flick posturing for indie darling of the year. Directed by Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Revolutionary Road, also known as Mr. Kate Winslet), written by Dave Eggers (Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, What Is the What) and Vendela Vida (co-editor of The Believer) and starring John Krasinski (The Office) and Maya Rudolph (Saturday Night Live), it’s obviously got a credit listing to make anyone like me take note.

The premise is that Burt and Verona (Krasinski and Rudolph), an unmarried couple expecting their first child, set out on a fact-finding mission, visiting friends and family across North America, in order to decide where to live after they learn there’s no longer anything keeping them in their current town.

I went in with reasonably high expectations, but not too high. I mean, even with an all-star cast and crew things can still go horribly, horribly wrong and in this case they didn’t. But they didn’t go wonderfully right, either, and the movie left me more than a little cold.

Let’s lay out the raft of pluses first, though. It is beyond awesome to see Maya Rudolph in a role like this, what with her being a) a fantastic performer and b) a woman of colour (for whom decent film roles are even fewer and farther between than those for white women). Away we go also more than passes the Bechdel test, something of a feminist credo that requires any movie to have 1) at least two women in it 2) who talk to each other 3) about something other than a man. With a hugely excellent supporting cast that includes the likes of Allison Janney, Catherine O’Hara, Melanie Lynskey, Carmen Ejogo and Maggie Gyllenhaal that shouldn’t be surprising (though given the current anti-woman climate in Hollywood these days, it still is).

Speaking of Maggie Gyllenhaal, I love it when she plays hippies! She was so perfectly cast as an anarchist baker in Stranger than Fiction (though it did strike me as weird they didn’t write the character as a vegan baker, for added authenticity) and she was equally excellent here as an earth-mama university professor whose fervent belief in the family bed and breastfeeding have turned her into a parody of elitist liberal intellectualism. Or, perhaps, that’s just what the movie does. Burt and Verona’s dinner at her upper-middle-class character home rises to a suitably hilarious conclusion involving a red stroller and a three-year-old exercising his autonomy, but Gyllenhaal’s too essentially likeable for me to understand Burt when he blows up at her character, calling her a “horrible person.” To me that’s a script issue, though. Slightly more successfully executed was Allison Janney’s character, a woman whose unstable personality translates into near abusive treatment of her own tweenage children (with hilarious results, to be sure; but as the first stop on Burt and Verona’s journey, she’s the first parenting cautionary tale).

There are many good jokes and funny moments throughout the movie, and frankly they’re what keep the thing afloat much of the time. For me, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t quite make a connection with Burt and Verona; I wasn’t sure why until I read the New York Times review, where A.O. Scott says, “This movie does not like you.” It doesn’t really like the majority of its supporting characters, and it likes its sometimes-bland, often-self-absorbed main characters too well.

I enjoyed the movie, I really did. But it didn’t let me far enough into its characters inner lives for me to really feel invested in it after the fact.