Cloying, overwritten and just as contrived as can be, “Must Love Dogs” has the urgent chattiness of a TV sitcom pilot (Attractive divorcee! New dating disaster every week!) expanded into trite and utterly predictable feature-length form. In any case, the title is self-fulfilling: This movie is a dog, and woe unto any undiscerning soul who loves it.

Diane Lane (“Under the Tuscan Sun”) once again finds herself romantically adrift as Sarah, a discarded woman of a certain age who teaches preschool and lives in a big, empty house all by herself.

Nonetheless, Sarah functions poorly as a mouthpiece for the miseries of midlife dating. For one, she looks like Diane Lane, and how hard can that be? Second, she enjoys a vast and nearby safety net of friends and family who make it impossible for her to feel alone. In the opening scene, we find Sarah in the midst of a vibrant post-divorce dating intervention, where her sister (Elizabeth Perkins) cracks one punch line after another and her elegant, imperious father (Christopher Plummer) expounds on the “black specter of two lives torn asunder.”

Who are these people? Where do they learn to talk this way? Only “Family Ties” creator Gary David Goldberg — who directed the movie and adapted the script from the book by chick-lit specialist Claire Cook — knows for sure.

After a string of abortive, Internet-brokered blind dates, Sarah finally finds a guy whose self-conscious banter would do her family proud: Jake (John Cusack), a romantically severed maker of handcrafted boats whose entire wardrobe seems to consist of a pair of jeans, a Ramones T-shirt and a button-down Oxford. Now Sarah has to choose between Jake and a ruggedly handsome single parent (Dermot Mulroney from “My Best Friend's Wedding”) who also appears quite perfect. What a cruel, profoundly uninteresting quandary.

As co-stars, Lane and Cusack spark briefly and heatlessly, like an engine that won't quite turn over. Goldberg's opportunistic TV sensibilities are partly to blame, but so is Cusack's apparent refusal to leave behind the angsty, limbo-oriented persona that has characterized so many of his roles (“Say Anything,” “High Fidelity”). With his excited blather about Halley's comet and the vagaries of a broken heart, Cusack clearly still fancies himself the earnest boy-poet, and like the Ramones T-shirt, he doesn't wear it well.

‘Must Love Dogs’
Starring: Diane Lane, John Cusack, Elizabeth Perkins, Christopher Plummer
Rating: PG-13 (sexual content)
Running time: 88 minutes
Playing: Opens Friday in Valley theaters