Likable leads can’t energize lackluster formula in Brooklyn Brothers Beat the Best, an indie about—tell me if this sounds familiar—a brokenhearted sad sack who travels cross-country with a weirdo and a too-hot-for-these-dorks woman on a road trip of healing and self-actualization. The moper in question is singer-songwriter Alex (Ryan O’Nan, also the writer/director), who carries around his ex’s Dear John letter and hooks up with toy instrument-playing kook Jim (Michael Weston) on a tour out West—a plan that seems fantastic after he’s both fired from his lousy real estate job and, at a gig for kids in which he wears a moose costume, repeatedly punches a disabled boy in the face. Along their wacky way, they pick up fetching Cassidy (Arielle Kebbel), land shows at unlikely venues (including a freaky frat house), betray each other, and deliver platitudes about embracing their outcast status as a fulfilling be-all/end-all. O’Nan and Weston’s rapport is engagingly prickly but their “Shins meets Sesame Street” tunes have a tweeness also found in the director’s music montages and lens flares. Only in its even-handed treatment of Alex’s fundamentalist-Christian brother (Andrew McCarthy) does the film feel like something less than a corny cornucopia of manchildren-grow-up clichés. Nick Schager