the shining; Jason Schwartzman turns on his signature slacker charm in "Shopgirl".(Movie Review)

Byline: Sally Singer

Jason Schwartzman has quickly established himself in the niche that Hollywood reserves for the awkward, existentially fraught but ultimately likable young man. Dustin Hoffman was once there; so, too, John Cusack. In Anand Tucker's Shopgirl, the film adaptation of Steve Martin's 2000 novella, Schwartzman plays Jeremy, the adorably self-involved slacker who, although largely absent from the screen (allowing Claire Danes and Martin to pursue their May-December romance), slyly at all times retains possession of the movie's heart.

Jeremy, a man ridiculously infatuated with amplifier signage and, less ridiculously, with Danes's Mirabelle, is never without a pen-size flashlight hanging from his baggy jeans. The flashlight was Schwartzman's idea, and points up a quest for illumination in which the 25-year-old actor himself seems be engaged: To date, he has elected to play a love-struck, extra-curricular-obsessed schoolboy fantasist (Wes Anderson's Rushmore); a speed freak trying to be good (Jonas ckerlund's Spun); and a man who instructs private investigators to solve the mystery of his place in the universe (David O. Russell's I (tm) Huckabees). These characters all rely on ...