The movie itself was rather overwhelmed by the advance announcement that its star, Joaquin Phoenix, was hereupon retiring from acting to pursue a career in hip-hop. It is a movie easily overwhelmed, an intimate little indie directed and co-written by James Gray (The Yards, We Own the Night, both with the selfsame Phoenix), about a suicidal jilted suitor who has moved back home with his parents in Brighton Beach and toils by day in their dry-cleaning store. In aid of his recovery, they try to set him up with a business associate’s nice, sweet, kind daughter (the Hilary Swank-y Vinessa Shaw), whose professed favorite movie is The Sound of Music. “That is a good movie,” he allows. “Underrated.” But he, for his part, only has eyes for Trouble: the “completely fucked-up” drug-abusing girl next door (Gwyneth Paltrow), or more exactly girl upstairs and across the courtyard, who is deep in an affair with a married man. The simple story, a tony takeoff on Dostoevski’s often-filmed White Nights, doesn’t have far to go and takes a long, slow time to get there. Phoenix’s striking discomfort in the leading role — the adolescent awkwardness in his body, the Herculean effort of speaking clearly and audibly — inevitably raises the question of whether his discomfort is the character’s or the actor’s. Either way, it works in the role, but the question is a distraction. With Isabella Rossellini, Moni Moshonov, Elias Koteas. (2009) — Duncan Shepherd