Watch Kelly & Cal Movie 

The fundamental problem, though, is not parenthood or the new neighborhood but aging: At a dinner with friends, Kelly is distressed to find that they too have turned into old bores, obsessed only with their dogs and counting calories.

Enter Cal (Jonny Weston), Kelly's teenage and newly wheelchair-using neighbor, who introduces himself to Kelly by promptly complimenting her breasts. Kelly's disgust soon gives way to friendship when she realizes that Cal is the only person around her who condones and even expects her to return to her youthful wild ways. When she spontaneously dyes her hair turquoise, he's the one who tells her it looks sexy.

Meanwhile, at home, Kelly gets harangued daily by Josh's imposing and uptight family. With their exaggerated overbearing behavior, Kelly's mother-in-law Bev (Cybill Shepherd) and sister-in-law Julie (Lucy Owen) are probably the most consistently amusing characters in the film: When Bev tells Kelly to "go out and do something nice for yourself," Julie suggests: "Like see a therapist!" That only drives Kelly closer to Cal, though, and with time, of course, their friendship begins shifting into something more romantic.

As Cal, Weston performs with the same sort of impassioned emotional candor that Aaron Paul brought to Jesse Pinkman in Breaking Bad. There's hardly the same painful premonition of tragedy in Cal as in Jesse, though. That's partly because he and Kelly converse largely in clichés — "You can't just let that chair be the only thing that defines you," Kelly yells at one point — so our connection to them remains distant and generic.

But Kelly & Cal's more pronounced shortcoming is that it never seriously relates to its protagonists' problems. It never considers whether Cal's depression after losing the use of his legs could be insurmountable, or whether it could be acceptable for Kelly to feel that settling down and having kids was a mistake. It's pleasant, or often just necessary, to give yourself over to a movie that guarantees a positive outcome, which Kelly & Cal certainly does. But it's difficult to do so when the film never bothers to respect the validity of its characters' struggles in the first place.