A visit from a dull artist making what appears to be an unbearably pretentious movie inexplicably turns the life of an LA couple upside down in the lackluster indie drama “Nobody Walks.”
Olivia Thirlby plays a clichéd idea of a New York artist (she wears black and doesn’t drive) who is staying with the friend of a friend, a shrink (Rosemarie DeWitt) and her sound-editor husband (John Krasinski), in LA while finishing her film. (Nobody walks there, get it?) Sparks fly between the analyst and a patient (Justin Kirk), while her husband can’t take his eyes off the Thirlby character.
Thirlby, who comes across as the kind of too-earnest undergraduate who would be mildly confused if someone told a joke, has nowhere near the magnetism to make us believe she would disrupt this family’s life. Her general airy mirthlessness is catching, and the only amazing aspect of this routine effort is that it was co-written by the witty “Girls” creator Lena Dunham, along with director Ry Russo-Young. None of Dunham’s humor comes across, except when someone says, “And when you speak, your words are snakes I swat at with swords,” which is hilarious, but not intentionally.