Our hero Gary (Martin Freeman), if you can call him such, is a thirtysomething nobody who was once a bit of a success as a pop musician.

Now he writes jingles for an advertising agency run by his best friend Paul (Simon Pegg). He has a live-in girl, Dora (Gwyneth Paltrow), and the relationship is tetchy. Former acquaintances, such as Jarvis Cocker, remember Gary as if he were dead.

This is the set-up of Jake Paltrow's reflective and in the end rather desultory film, which he wrote and directed as his first feature.

Paltrow is Gwyneth's brother, and he has decked out his older sister as unflatteringly as possible.

We scarcely remember the glamorous figure of previous films. Freeman, however, remains more like he often appears - a slightly crumpled-looking, very British sad-sack who has no idea where he is going or why things aren't humming along as they should.

The refuge he finds, when he turns out the light at night after reading a book called The Middle East Crisis (or is it The Midlife Crisis?) is in his dreams.

Here, he finds Penélope Cruz, dressed to kill in virginal white, but ready for anything he can give her, like a very sympathetic call-girl.

At one point he gets up from the bed he shares with Dora to masturbate in the bathroom - which makes her seriously fed up. He's got it bad, and the only thing he can think of doing is obtaining advice from Danny DeVito's bustling New Age idealist who runs classes where people hug each other but does obsequious waiting jobs on the side.

The Good Night potters along towards a seemingly happier conclusion - though this is not much aided by a piece of music written by Gary that surely shows he isn't very talented at all. It's the sort of piano piece you hear in lifts whether you want to or not.

Be that as it may, the idea that dreaming is believing isn't very convincingly laid out and Paltrow's debut, though it has some good moments, falls away into nothing very much in the end.