The new independent film Broken would be a tight, effective drama...if it was made by a college student for his senior project. It's one of those films where everything is right on the nose, the kind of moviemaking that students often mistake for deep and symbolic. It feels like an early twenty-something's idea of what drug use is like and how shattered dreams should be represented on film - with a sledgehammer to the audience's head. Unlike like a lot of equally bad and significantly worse films, you don't feel like anyone involved with Broken was being lazy, they're all doing their best, but it never gels. It never gets beyond a cool senior project. But you wouldn't pay to see a cool senior project.

Broken stars Heather Graham as Hope, a gorgeous girl who wants to make it as a musician in Hollywood. On her way to superstardom, Hope gets sidelined by a love affair with Will (Jeremy Sisto) - and, yes, Broken is one of those movies where you're expected to make a lot of the lead character's names, Hope and Will. The passionate Will seems like the man for Hope, but he also turns out to have a small addiction to heroin, which he passes on to his new girl. Broken flashes back and forth between an older Hope, now working at a diner and dealing with her shattered dreams, and memories of the rise and fall of her passionate affair with Will. We watch as Will steals a car, grabs a gun, and heads to the diner to confront the now-ex-girlfriend Hope and everything builds towards an unexpected conclusion.

Heather Graham has hit an unusual pothole in her career. She broke through with great turns in movies like Swingers and Boogie Nights, but she's been largely limited to straight-to-DVD work lately (and a great guest turn on Scrubs). What happened? Graham has actually become a better actress and does surprisingly good work in Broken, selling both the wide-eyed early days of Hope and the bitter latter ones. She doesn't quite make the junkie stuff believable, but Sisto more than makes up for that, doing strong work as the guy who says all the right things but only sucks the life out of Hope (get it?). There's nothing wrong with the work by Sisto or Graham, even if they're not the first two actors you would think of to tell the story of heroin-addicted, doomed lovers.

What goes wrong with Broken is all behind the camera. Director Alan White is making his debut and writer Drew Pillsbury has one other screenwriting credit and dozens of guest turns on television as an actor. Both show promise, but they highlight every twist and turn of Broken with neon signs and big letters. Hope spends the night in the diner dealing with a variety of customers who all represent different paths our heroine could have gone down. She's jealous of a band about to break through when she didn't and even a high-priced call girl. In case you don't realize that all of these characters are symbolic, White even puts Graham in their costumes in one scene. Are we living in Hope's mind? Do you want to watch a movie where no one, not even the lead characters, feel real? It makes all the emotions ring hollow, like a film school student with great ideas, but not yet the skills to make them feel real. Ultimately, despite good work by the two leads to put it back together again, Broken lives up to its title.