Broken

It's hard to say who suffers most after boy meets girl at the beach. Is it Hope (Heather Graham), who turns to heroin and can't get a singing gig because of those damned track marks? Is it Will (Jeremy Sisto), who goes psycho after Hope dumps him? Or is it audiences, who are subjected to the most dubious plays on character names since Nearing Grace? Hungry for dope but short on cash, boy keeps girl in check with a maxim from his youth: "Where there's a Will, there's a way." Disgusted by Will's perpetual drugging—and maybe even his corny witticisms—Hope cleans up and gets a job at a diner, which becomes the locus of director Alan White's lame aspirations to Lynchian meta-ness. Freely toggling back and forth in time, White lays on Hope a misogynistic guilt trip that revolves around bird-brained psychoanalysis and gratuitous girl-on-girl action. Every diner patron laughably represents some facet of Hope's victimology as an artist and woman, from the agent who insincerely promises fame to a group of aspiring musicians to the filthy old woman who stands for Hope's future if she doesn't lay off the smack. By the time a skeevy producer offers her a part in a movie titled—wait for it—Broken, one begins to pity Graham for having walked into such a transparent booby trap.