Meryl Streep plays dive bar rockstar Ricki Rendazzo in Ricki and the Flash, a movie that, like its leather-wearing, guitar-shredding protagonist, is a lot softer and harmless on the inside than on its edgy exterior would indicate. It’s directed by Jonathan Demme, written by Diablo Cody, and along with Streep stars her daughter, Mamie Gummer, Kevin Kline, Sebastian Stan and Rick effing Springfield. The stacked crew of talent fashions a generally low-key family drama with a few surprises up its sleeve, making for a pleasant summertime distraction.

Working at a Total Foods by day (a Whole Foods stand-in) and jamming out sets of cover tunes in front of modest crowds at The Salt Well with her band, The Flash, by night, 60-something Ricki’s carved out a quaint, unglamorous but artistically fulfilling life for herself in Tarzana, California. She gets into the occasional tiff with her boyfriend/lead guitarist (Springfield), but the townsfolk love her and she’s got a nightly gig, which is more than most starving musicians could ever hope for.

In her previous life, she was called Linda Brummell, and she was living the American Dream, raising three kids with her ex, Pete (Kline). Ricki’s been estranged from them for years, but Pete calls her out of the blue to invite her back to Indianapolis, where he lives with his new wife, Maureen (a pitch-perfect Audra McDonald). Ricki’s split from the family wasn’t a pretty one (we learn more later), so a phone call from Pete is anything but normal, but desperate times call for desperate measures: their daughter, Julie (Gummer), has just been dumped by her fiance, leaving her in a nasty state. Ricki hops on a plane straight away; this is her chance to pick up the pieces and be Julie’s mom again, though Julie isn’t exactly thrilled at the thought of repairing the long-stagnant relationship.

Ricki and Pete’s two sons are even less open to accepting their mom back into their lives. Josh (Stan) is engaged to a pampered rich girl who’s repulsed by his mother’s ’80s rock attire and filthy mouth; Adam (Nick Westrate) is gay and views Ricki as a walking contradiction, her tattoos and progressive attitude a front, in his eyes, for her self-professed Obama-hating, Republican political views. “She voted for Geroge W. Bush!” he screams. It’s clear Ricki and Julie are cut from the same cloth: when they unleash a barrage of fiery barbs on an eavesdropper at a local donut shop, they shoot evil glares over their shoulders in perfect unison, just like the Siamese cats from 101 Dalmatians. Gummer’s uncanny resemblance to her mother makes the scene sing.

Cody’s script tries to juggle too many themes and ideas, abandoning a lot of them on the way. Parental gender inequity and the weight of maternal responsibility define the central narrative arc, but neither feels adequately explored by the end credits. What comes through the loudest and proudest is the beauty and power of Ricki’s passion for music, which shouldn’t come as a surprise considering who’s sitting the director’s chair. Demme shoots concert footage better than just about anybody (Stop Making Sense is incomparable), and he flexes that muscle here, capturing perfectly Streep’s gutsy live performances (she sings every song herself and even learned how to play guitar for the role). Highlights include renditions of Bruce Springsteen, Lady Gaga and Tom Petty classics (and a pop stinker by Pink).

Though Ricki’s maligned by just about everyone in her family for wiggling out of the motherly role she was dealt to run off and pursue another dream, they eventually learn to appreciate her free-wheeling, risk-taking outlook on life. None of the supporting characters are all that complex, but Ricki’s incredibly layered and three-dimensional, many of her core personality traits in direct competition with one another. There’s the George W. Bush thing, but there’s also the fact that she loves her children to death, and yet couldn’t stop herself from leaving them behind to pursue her music career. Streep is almost acrobatic in how she controls a scene, flipping the tone and temperature of a conversation several times with subtle facial expressions and well-timed zingers (provided of course by Cody, the undisputed queen of mean).

The movie’s biggest disappointment is its even-steven ending, which wraps things up too nicely. Things actually get pretty turbulent during the middle section, which caught me off-guard in a good way, but the way Cody resolves every little conflict so neatly is a bit of a let-down. Cody plays it safe, which, unfortunately, puts a damper the quality of everyone else’s work. Streep definitely gets her shine, though, like when she busts out an acoustic guitar for a solo performance of the movie’s one original song, “Cold One,” written by Jenny Lewis and Jonathan Rice. It’s a super catchy tune that, like the other musical numbers, provides a welcome respite from Cody’s overly tentative writing.

When a movie about chronic pain so embodies its subject matter that it becomes a pain in the ass to watch itself, it’s got to offer something more to prove its artistic worth; otherwise, it’s just a misery simulator. The only “something more” Cake offers is a tedious mystery thread. We follow Claire (Jennifer Aniston), a divorced lawyer with a scarred-up body and face who we watch drink, pop pills (as she drinks), take naps (after she drinks), treat people like shit, moan a lot, and saunter around her expensive L.A. home like a zombie. By gathering clues we discover how she got her scars, why she suffers from such debilitating pain, why she’s such a bitch, and how in the hell her friends can tolerate her self-involved bullshit. Piecing together the tragic history behind Claire’s scars is a chore; Memento this is not.

The most likely reason you’ve heard about Cake is because Aniston’s performance garnered her a Golden Globes nomination and some peppered critical praise. There’s been a fascination with watching our prettiest actors looking as unflattering as possible (i.e. like real people–gasp!) that’s been growing steadily for the past couple of decades, and the inclination may be to lump Aniston in with the likes of other “go ugly” alumni like Charlize Theron (Monster), Halle Berry (Monster’s Ball), and Nicole Kidman (The Hours). But I have no interest in penalizing her for this correlation, nor do I find the juxtaposition of real-life starlets stripped of their glamour illuminative or poignant. Bottom line: Aniston’s performance is really, really good. It’s lived-in, believable, unadorned, and at times moving. The effort is there, but what ultimately stifles her is the sleepy, flat-lined script that perpetually spins its wheels.

At first Claire seems like a relatable protag, even a funny one. In the middle of a chronic pain support group (she looks in agony just sitting there) she incisively undresses the group’s be-one-with-your-emotions phoniness when asked about Nina (Anna Kendrick), one of the group’s members who killed herself by jumping off a freeway overpass. She talks to Nina’s ghost sometimes, which through eye-rolling contrivance leads her to Roy (Sam Worthington), her dead Nina’s husband. Unlike her studly gardener who she bangs on occasion, Claire finds a sentimental commonality with Roy.

But the true life raft keeping the emotionally shipwrecked Claire from drowning (she literally tries to drown herself) is her housekeeper, Silvana (Adriana Barraza, very strong), who’s treated and paid less than fairly for all she does (though Claire’s loaded enough to petulantly throw money at her whenever she owes an apology). There are other people orbiting Claire’s black hole of depression, including her ex-husband (Chris Messina), her physical therapy coach (Mamie Gummer), and her support group leader (Felicity Huffman, who shares with Aniston the film’s funniest scene, involving a jumbo-sized bottle of Costco vodka), but none of them do much more than suffer as they listen to her imperious bullshit.

Aniston and the makeup team do their best to wipe away any memories you have of her as the desirable girl-with-the-hair Rachel on Friends, covering her with those scars and making her hair look as bland and stringy as a Triscuit. Her resting face looks like she puked two minutes ago. You can tell she approached the role with no ego. The most striking facet of her performance is her body movement; watching her wince and groan as she shuffles from one room to the next looks convincingly painful, and even evokes a bit of sympathy for the otherwise icy Claire.

Director Daniel Barnz finds myriad ways to show Claire horizontal: she sleeps a lot, beds the gardener, sleeps with Roy (just sleeps), lays flat in the passenger seat whenever she’s driven, floats belly-up in the pool, passes out in front of the toilet after overdosing on pills…and the list goes on. This is Barnz’ main visual motif, and he’s so obsessed with it that it feels kind of insulting to our intelligence. (Hell, even the opening title has the “A” in CAKE laid sideways.) This is all meant to bolster the impact of the film’s final shot, in which (spoiler alert) Claire sits up straight (WHOA). The strategy backfires, as the moment is so telegraphed you can’t help but cringe at how obtuse it is.

There’s barely a trace of plot to keep things moving, and it seems Barnz is banking on the “mystery of the scars” to propel the film. Screenwriter Patrick Tobin carefully places his little nuggets of information about Claire’s past intermittently and gives us just enough to figure it out on our own. The reason the process isn’t compelling is because it’s a bridge to nowhere; Cake is monotonous, rudderless, and doesn’t make any real statements about depression, suicide, or the act of grieving. It’s a film starving for something more, and while Aniston makes good use of it as a platform to show she’s got chops, it’s not the career-defining film she and many others hoped it would be.

It used to be that indie cinema was the place to go to get fresh perspective on common film themes. Somewhere along the way indie films have formed their own grooves and well-worn paths, and every so often someone gets stuck in them. One such trend are clichéd englightenment films, where a character has a crisis of faith/life/romance/whatever and runs away to someplace new, because as we all know, the answers are “out there”. Echo Park is just such a film. Named for Echo Park, a hipster hot spot in LA, this uninspired neighborhood serves as the background to an unoriginal tale of transformation.

Mamie Gummer (whose previous works show she is obviously better than all this) plays Sophie, a women whose long-term boyfriend and upper class West LA life just doesn’t seem fulfilling any more. So she moves to Echo Park, land of coffee shops, record stores, and people with suspicious amounts of free time. She buys a couch from Alex (Anthony Okungbowa) who starts to imbue his wisdom from the get-go on how great life can be when you get to know your neighbors. He awkwardly asks Sophie to come play soccer with his best friend (and neighbor, of course) Mateo (Maurice Compte) and his son Elias (Ricky Rico). She awkwardly declines, then does it anyway. And thus begins Sophie’s predictable rebound affair with Alex, who also predictably wishes it was more than it is despite his impending move to England. Sophie hangs out with her new friend group, encourages Elias’s new photography interest, and ignores calls from her ex. Helen Slater shows up as Sophie’s hysterical stuck-up mother, offering absolutely no motherly advice whatsoever, or any emotion for that matter. When Simon (Gale Harold), the ex, comes knocking on Sophie’s door, she gives in to his overbearing requests, but ultimately has to decide whether to return to her old life or take a chance on this new one in Echo Park.

Maybe someday a person dealing with a stagnant relationship and a crisis of lifestyle choice will try something more inspired than making friends with ethnically diverse children or engaging in doomed-to-failure rebound relationships. It feels as though first time director Amanda Marsalis read Catalina Aguilar Mastretta’s script set in a LA cultural hub, it reminded her of a breakup, and she declared it inspired. As though rebound relationships and randomly buying houses in unknown neighborhoods are usually remedies for life’s problems . (And for the record, with real estate prices where they are in Echo Park, Sophie buying a house there is about the best way to highlight her obvious socioeconomic differences from her neighbors.)

Really this film does no justice to the diverse neighborhood of Echo Park, nor to the nuanced emotions and reasons for breakups and makeups. Alex says at one point “why do people always go back?” But he never questions the changing nature of people in general. That people can change for the better. His words are naïve and indeed the entire film exudes this same shortsightedness. Echo Park is a presumptive piece of work, relying on its audience to be on the same page: Echo Park is magic, breakups suck, running away is the best path to enlightenment, and the people one meets in the midst of life change are only there to serve one’s forward movement. A shallow film, with shallow characters, this film does Echo Park tourism no favors.