Directed by: Christine Jeffs

Starring: Amy Adams, Emily Blunt, Jason Spevack, Steve Zahn, Alan Arkin

MPAA rating: R (for adult language, adult situations)

Running time: 91 minutes

Best suited for: indie drama connoisseurs, art-housers

Least suited for: fans of the complete story

Rose Lorkowski (Amy Adams) is a single mother in her mid-30s living in a small town. Apparently, her best years are behind her. Once a perky high school coed, she's now cleaning homes to make ends meet. Her younger sister, Norah (Emily Blunt), is no better off, waitressing while hoping for a better future.

When Rose's young son Oscar (Jason Spevack) is expelled from school for licking (this time, his teacher's leg), Rose must find Oscar a new school and change careers to make ends meet.

The problem: Crime-scene cleaning—a biohazardous, utterly icky job—seems to be the only career option available to her.

Rose enlists Norah's help and the two dutifully begin the task of cleaning up after the dearly departed.

I do like both Adams and Blunt in this one—Adams as a once-upon-a-time cheerleader whose friends are all well-to-do housewives and Blunt as the troubled sibling still living in her older sister's shadow. Alan Arkin co-stars as their widowed father who's habitually trying out get-rich-quick schemes and failing.

The three form a kind of gently dysfunctional family conspiring against the world to compete at a level seemingly just beyond their grasp. There's really no villain in "Sunshine Cleaning," just fate snuffing out happiness at every turn.

The film, though, comes across as the outline draft of a potentially meaty tale. The characters are in place, the plot devices ready . . . but what ultimately emerges is incomplete and largely unfulfilling. Despite some clever and interesting setups, "Sunshine Cleaning" delivers only sporadically and superficially.

Take Oscar, for example. Oscar the licker. Wow. Never came across that trait before. Oscar's a cute kid, earnest and lovable, but his little peculiarity gets lost along the way.

Or take the Lorkowski sisters' newfound profession. A lot of interesting possibilities there. We manage to glimpse a few traumatic incidentals, but too quickly the sisters are smoothly up and running.

No, I'm not a fan of gratuitous gore for gore's sake, but if one pens a film around the notion of such an unlikely profession, I do expect a quotient of relativity.

At one point Norah secretly befriends the troubled daughter (Mary Lynn Rajskub) of a client—and a delicate relationship begins to blossom.

But this side story, along with several others, dissipates without fulfillment.

There's a nice scene with Rose befriending the bewildered wife of a suicide victim, a moment of clarity in the lives of both Rose and the film, but these fragments are too infrequent.

By the way, despite the trailer's notion that "Sunshine Cleaning" might be a kind of "gross-out" comedy, the film is really an erstwhile drama with slight comedic overtones.

And while both sisters begin to evolve along the way, I don't like the almost throwaway afterthought (pertinent but so perfectly coincidental) of their mother's fate and their sibling rivalry.

Yeah, something relevant could have been told here, but too much is truncated, revealed merely in passing.

For drama lovers, "Sunshine Cleaning" is perhaps an intriguing character study, but its swiftness afoot prevents us from fully appreciating the family or the relevant events that construct their lives.