Echoes of The Graduate and mid-1970s Woody Allen ring through some leafy Vancouver scenery in the home-grown comic romance Moving Malcolm.

But actor Benjamin Ratner, making his writing-directing debut with the help of some talented friends, spins something of his own from the story of a young writer jilted on his wedding day.

After his B-actress bride-to-be (Elizabeth Berkley) ducks out of the service for a smoke and doesn't come back, Gene Maxwell (Ratner) spends the next year writing a tortured novel.

Square-jawed Nicholas Lea (Krycek on The X-Files) gets to chew on some tasty comic bits as Gene's best friend Herbert, a dance instructor who spends weekends playing Sgt. Rock in paint-ball war games and evenings sneaking into Gene's apartment to watch his home-made porn videos.

Jay Brazeau and Babz Chula fill up the screen as Gene's parents, two outsized personalities who offer post-breakup therapy through food (mom) and loud, unsolicited advice (dad). Ratner and his co-stars paint that family life with a mixture of sight gags and heart, aided hugely by Rebecca Harker's intuitive portrayal of Gene's autistic younger sister.

Amid all this, ex-fiancée Liz comes back into Gene's life with a problem: she's heading to Prague to make a movie and her aged father (John Neville) needs a hand moving into a new apartment. Can Gene help him move?

As Liz pursues low-rent stardom on a Czech movie set, Gene learns something about himself, life and the joys of driving late at night, naked, from her father. Neville brings a courtly -- but appropriately tattered -- grace to this movie's Malcolm.

Ratner the actor has an appealing everyman charm as the conflicted soul amid all these eccentrics, while Ratner the writer-director knows when to pull back from the larger-than-life character quirks to alight on deft moments of genuine humanity.

"I was too old. I took too many pills," Chula as Gene's mother says simply to her son, watching her daughter playing by a duck pond on her 19th birthday.

Ratner aims both to charm and to touch and mostly hits the mark on both.