Jeff Who Lives at Home

The key ingredients are in place for Jeff Who Lives at Home to be an amusing sort of offbeat independent comedy.

Unfortunately, however, the latest effort from sibling filmmakers Jay and Mark Duplass (Cyrus) is a slacker misfire that doesn’t add up to very much.

It’s a modest and meandering comedy of arrested development amid a dysfunctional family that stars Jason Segel (The Muppets) in the title role, as a stoner whose mother (Susan Sarandon) asks him to leave the comfort of his basement to purchase some wood glue at the local home-improvement store.

The journey that follows is one not of adhesive products but of self-discovery, as Jeff begins obsessing over the significance of a prank phone call and daydreaming about the cosmic order of the universe.

Then he has a chance encounter with his brother, Pat (Ed Helms), becoming an unlikely accomplice in his daylong quest to figure out whether his wife (Judy Greer) is cheating on him.

Duplass comedies tend to have a bizarre, borderline creepy quality, something this trifle achieves through characters that are more weird than likeable. It takes a while to figure out that Jeff’s intentions are genuine, and that his eccentricities don’t have any sort of malicious intent.

Segel provides a highlight with an understated performance that offers a contrast to the neurotic Helms. Still, Jeff comes off as a bit of a buffoon who lacks many endearing characteristics, a situation not helped by an episodic script from the Duplass brothers that feels thrown together from a collection of half-baked ideas.

It’s unclear whether the characters are supposed to be laughed at or laughed with, or both. Meanwhile, Sarandon is wasted in a silly workplace subplot that feels intended to pad the running time.

The film has some effective vignettes — basically comic exaggerations stemming from real-world scenarios — that are both funny and sweet. Yet its detours into existential discussions about relationships don’t achieve the desired charm or poignancy, and neither does its head-scratching climax.

Overall, it’s a pretty thin concept for a feature, with some potent one-liners and sight gags that are more sporadic than consistent.

Rated R, 83 minutes.