At their worst, American independent films are not ambitious failures, but failures because they have no ambition—quirky nothings that travel a 90-minute distance without a destination, then seem to evaporate into the ether. By tossing aside the strictures of Hollywood narrative in favor of more character-driven work, indies risk another set of pitfalls: For every Hal Hartley or Jim Jarmusch piece, there are a dozen trifles so thinly conceptualized and thematically undernourished that they might as well not exist. Inspired in equal parts by Jarmusch's low-key, deadpan multiculturalism and the paralyzing uncertainty of Dustin Hoffman's character in The Graduate, Joel Hopkins' Jump Tomorrow chooses the path of least resistance, the road-movie genre, and follows it into twee, affected oblivion. Set against a hip, attractive mod backdrop, with colorful interiors and a pleasing lounge-pop soundtrack, Tunde Adebimpe looks markedly out of place in his stiff gray suit and thick-framed eyeglasses. A comic hero in the reserved, poker-faced tradition of Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati, Adebimpe takes such a passive role in his life that he allows his uncle to dupe him into an arranged marriage with a Nigerian woman. After he misses his fiancée's flight by a full day, Adebimpe intersects with two other people at the airport: Hippolyte Girardot, a hopelessly romantic Frenchman who just had his own marriage proposal rebuffed, and Natalia Verbeke, an attractive, vivacious Spaniard who stokes Adebimpe's doubts about the wedding. Due in Niagara Falls in three days for the ceremony, Adebimpe accepts a ride in Girardot's flaky Citroën (license plate: L'AMOUR), but the two men wind up following Verbeke through several detours as she and her boyfriend (James Wilby) hitchhike to Canada. The main detours, including nights at a time-locked '60s honeymoon hotel and Verbeke's spirited family home, are diverting enough on their own. But in a film that offers nothing but mild diversions, they grow increasingly slight and inconsequential, a few more grueling stops on the meandering road to Niagara. In The Graduate, which Hopkins references numerous scenes, Hoffman's refusal to contend with his predetermined future spoke to the aimless ennui of an entire generation. But Jump Tomorrow takes place in a retro-mod present that doesn't exist, and Adebimpe's adventures lead to no discernable point. While offbeat, episodic comedies like this one don't necessarily need a point, it doesn't hurt if they're a lot funnier than this.