An enormously promising actress too often stuck in thankless roles in forgettable movies, Clea DuVall radiates a mixture of strength, vulnerability, premature wisdom, and willful naiveté that's ideally suited to her role as an adolescent coming to terms with herself and her distant past in Wildflowers. But DuVall is just about all there is to like about the film, an otherwise dreary and fuzzy-headed coming-of-age story set in a 1985 in which the '60s never really went away. Raised in a commune by her loving but clueless father, DuVall becomes obsessed with Daryl Hannah, the artistic muse of a much older writer. As she spends more time with her, DuVall begins to suspect that Hannah is her mother, a notion she's understandably reluctant to bring up with the notoriously commitment-phobic drifter. Recent years have seen a revisionist trend to depict the mid- to late '60s as a time of loathsome selfishness and society-destroying irresponsibility, a perspective Wildflowers neither avoids nor wholly supports. The leftover hippies in writer-director Melissa Painter's debut are undeniably fuck-ups, but they're romanticized fuck-ups, beautiful losers following their own path even if it means hurting those around them. It's a take on the lingering effects of the '60s that would be refreshingly ambiguous if the film itself weren't so pretentious, self-infatuated, and aimless. Painter has apparently never encountered a self-indulgent stylistic effect she didn't like, and she fills Wildflowers with dreamy slow motion, arty fades, and irritating jump cuts that only underscore its lack of direction. Even more problematic is Hannah's facile performance as a mysterious object of desire, but even an actress capable of depth and subtlety would have a hard time dealing with the character's heavy symbolic baggage and wild mood swings. Getting further off track as it goes along, Wildflowers drowns DuVall's sensitive, compelling lead performance in a sea of insufferable pretension and regrettable hippie mysticism.