Sometimes your coolest friends are also your most annoying. And sometimes those off-beat, truly witty comedies can wear thin and fray your funny bone.

You know the friends I’m talking about…the ones who brag about shopping at thrift stores (not out of necessity), can toss out obscure French philosophers’ cosmic nuggets without a pause, and rally against the mainstream sensibilities with a certain bohemian nobility.

These are mostly good things, until you’re stuck on a two-week road trip with them. Not only do their Birkenstocks smell like Havarti left in a tanning booth, but you slowly realize the angst and malaise they direct at the picket-fenced American dream only because they can’t have that dream. Or at least won’t admit they want it.

These people travel in the same circle of friends as Burt Farlander (“The Office’s John Krasinski) and Verona De Tessant (SNL’s Maya Rudolph), an early ‘30s couple with a baby on the way and nowhere to call home. Well, they have a middle America rural lean-to with a garbage bag window, but with Burt’s quirky parents/neighbors (Jeff Daniels and Catherine O’Hara) making a break for Austria, the couple wants to find a place to raise their kid where there are a few familiar faces in the background.

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They want to raise their kids well. Not just because they’re good people from good homes, but because they’ve come to the startling conclusion that might just be “f$ck-ups” – their words, not mine. They’re not really “f$ck-ups,” they’re just self-absorbed slow starters with smelly Birkenstocks, like many of us.

That’s the plot for “Away We Go,” Director Sam Mendes’ best film since the Oscar-winning “American Beauty.” Burt and Verona, attached but not married, zig-zag from Arizona to Madison to Montreal and Miami meeting bizarrely over-the top friends and family, like Burt’s old chum LN (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a granola-munching feminist professor who hates strollers and showers. It’s these moments that poke holes in the whitewalls of an otherwise pleasant trip. So much of the movie is real and down-to-earth and most of the time we’re thinking, “We know people like these,” even if we don’t always like them.

Editing 15 minutes out of the movie would make it go from two and a half stars to four. But it would also cause it to be a mainstream hit, precisely what Burt and Verona are afraid of.

"Away We Go" is 98 minutes, rated R and is now playing in Richmond and select cities. Mike gives the movie two and a half stars out of a possible four.

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