There was a bit of quiet furor when the teaser trailer for Garden State hit this past spring. It was a wordless assemblage of striking imagery and music that evoked...well, quite a bit, especially for people who saw in it hints of cynicism, love, parental strife, depression and all the other things that make The Catcher In The Rye popular. I know I felt that I had seen something special when I first saw it, and sure enough, a quick hop online afterwards found people raving about it.

And then, as always happens with good things that are loved too much, a backlash became perceptible. Usually it happens after a film is out; with Lost In Translation, say, it wasn't felt until it started getting Oscar nominations that people started to turn on it. In this case, it only seemed a matter of weeks before naysayers began to pick apart the film based on what was or wasn't in the trailer; it was too show-offy to be emotional, too hip to be sincere, too derivative to be really good. Perhaps there was even a reason it didn't have any dialogue.

And so, because I know I'm highly susceptible to superior cinematic advertising, I dashed my expectations in advance, repetitively, until I found myself in the theater ready to pick it apart, beat by beat. The film began, and I waited for the first misstep to occur. It happened, pretty quickly -- just a little thing my critical mind recognized as a problem. Then there was another one, and another -- the camera crossing the 180 degree line, perhaps, or an edit that seemed a little too awkward. By that time, though, I had ceased to care, because what's the point of going to the movies if you're not willing to let them win you over? Garden State won me over, quickly. Writer-director-star Zach Braff is not the second coming of Wes Anderson or Sofia Coppola; he is an imperfect auteur with enormous talent present in his triumvirate of roles, a keen eye, and a heart on his sleeve that's sincere enough to make the occasional mawkish line or running-through-the-airport scene work.

The film is about a young man going home. People only go home in movies because someone's getting married or someone's died, and in this case Andrew Largeman's mother has died, and his estranged father (Ian Holm) asks him to leave Los Angeles and return to New Jersey for a few days, to set a few things straight. He arrives just as the coffin is being interred; one of his old friends, Mark (Peter Sarsgaard), is the gravedigger, and he promptly invites Andrew to a party where they smoke pot and do drugs and Andrew sits on the couch and watches the debauchery with a modest nonchalance.

He's been on plenty of drugs his whole life, we come to understand; handfuls of antidepressants, all prescribed to him by his psychiatrist father. He reveals that, on a whim, he left all his pills in Los Angeles, and that this trip home is the first time he's been unmedicated since he was nine years old. Later, he'll explain why he was put on the pills in the first place, and he'll try to explain that explanation and listen to his father offer his own take on it and then decide that some things are simpler than people want to believe. He'll talk about how he hasn't cried since he was nine years old, and so we predict that he'll cry before he leaves New Jersey, and he does, sort of. The whole movie sets expectations like that, but also twists them just enough that we never have to sit through a moment that feels entirely calculated. Like how when we hear that Sam (Natalie Portman), the girl Andrew meets and starts to like, is an epileptic, we sorta expect her to have a seizure, and that that'll be a defining moment in the movie.

Now Sam, Sam is the movie's truest joy, and I say this as an unabased Natalie Portman fan who is overjoyed to see her in a such a great leading role in such a good movie -- something, I came to realize, she hasn't really had since her first movie, Leon. Portman is a genuinely gifted actress, and she takes a role that could have been annoying and makes it beautiful. She has two moments where she cries that broke my heart, and about a hundred where she laughs a laugh that just radiates with...well, something that's incredibly crush-inducing.

Braff himself is no slouch in the performance department, but then again, he wrote the role for himself to play. On that note, his writing is good, and he and the rest of the cast often make it seem great. His comic sensibilities are on target most of the time (I wouldn't have minded seeing the bit with Sam's brother excised) and his dramatic notions, as earnest as they sometimes get, are never too overbearing. He falls back on some common themes about love and family that you've almost certainly heard before, and sometimes he seems to be reaching into a grab bag of twentysomething issues with which to deal, but almost all of it works. What doesn't is the relationship between Andrew and his father, which doesn't have enough meat to it to make its resolution as moving as it could have been. It's a shame that Ian Holm isn't as utilized as much as the rest of the cast.

On the directorial front, Braff has his impeccable money shots that display perfect 2:35:1 symmetry and a love of wide angle lenses and swooping cranes; he also has the aforementioned mistakes that you often see in very low budget films. Between both of those extremes is a down to earth film made by a sincere director who has a story he wants to tell and emotions he wants to convey. His heart, imagination and tear ducts are right there on his sleeve, for better or worse, and all the cynics can begrudge him that, and complain about what they will. I choose to embrace the film. Not blindly, mind you, but I'm always one who's quick to take the good with the bad if the good is good enough. Garden State is good enough.