* * 1/2

Kate Beckinsale, Michael Angarano, Sam Rockwell, Olivia Thirlby, Amy Sedaris, Nicky Katt, Griffin Dunne. Screenplay by David Gordon Green from the novel by Stewart O’Nan. Rated R. 106 minutes. Warner Independent Pictures.

A delicate young romance flowers while a destructive marriage dies in David Gordon Green’s Snow Angels, a painful and sometimes affecting small-town drama that explores a young man coming to terms with his feelings of first love while watching his parents divorce and another local couple’s lives implode.

High school student Arthur (a fresh Michael Angarano) develops a crush on offbeat Lila (Juno’s Olivia Thirlby), a brainy photographer and new transfer student who watches him in the marching band, while his parents (Jeannetta Arnette, Griffin Dunne) are splitting up. Arthur works part-time at the local restaurant, where his former babysitter and newly single mom Annie (Kate Beckinsale) is now a waitress struggling to extricate herself from marriage to a self-pitying drunk (Sam Rockwell) who has experienced a religious conversion and can’t come to terms with their separation. Fellow waitress Barb (an effectively dramatic Amy Sedaris) is Annie’s best friend, whose boyfriend Nate (Nicky Katt) sleeps with Annie on the side.

This connected ensemble intrigues for awhile, until a critical tragedy informs the film’s second half, and the story fails to effectively deal with this event, inadequately exploring the consequences of the grief, rendering the event episodic to the plot. The film’s second half loses its way and as the plot thickens, the dramatic tension somehow dissipates as the film marches toward darkness in a climax that is predictably depressing. It is hard to say what has been learned by the end of the film, or the impact it has had on its young protagonist, and the disparate story threads fail to find narrative or thematic cohesion.

Yet there are undeniable rewards in Snow Angels, principally Kate Beckinsale, always an underrated actress, who is superb here as a beleaguered wife and mother in a crisis, trying to remake her life but continuing to make further mistakes. The actress quite convincingly summons pain and anger, and the film comes to life whenever she is onscreen, including an effective late outburst with an equally powerful Rockwell that seals her character’s fate.

As much as I enjoyed elements of Snow Angels, something here feels calculatedly bleak about these dead ends lives—a little too desperate, a little too cornered and a little too movie-ish. A decade ago I would have heralded this film an original, independent vision. Today it feels familiar, albeit well performed. Ultimately, Snow Angels is muddled, but the pleasures along the way are notable.

-Lee Shoquist