“House of D” marks the writing and directing debut of “X-Files” actor David Duchovny, and no, he shouldn't quit his day job. Clumsily sentimental and spottily acted, this guileless coming-of-age story does little to minimize the oft-quoted stigma of Hollywood stars who “want to direct.”

Duchovny plays Tom Warshaw, a scruffy American artist living in Paris. With narration so blunt that you could use it to mash cornmeal, Tom reveals that he has a secret: “I have a secret,” says he. On his teenage son's birthday, Tom resolves to confess said secret to his pretty French wife (Magali Amadei). And so begins a story of misfortune and manhood that suggests a Mad-Libs salute to Charles Dickens.

Flash back 30 years: 12-year-old Tommy Warshaw (Anton Yelchin from “Hearts in Atlantis”) lives alone with his widowed, pill-popping mother (Tea Leoni, Duchovny's real-life wife) in a cramped Greenwich Village flat.
Intelligent and precocious, Tommy earns pennies as a butcher's delivery boy alongside his best friend, a mildly retarded middle-aged loner named Pappas (Robin Williams, squarely in his element). As pressures both maternal and hormonal mount, Tommy seeks counsel from a barely seen black inmate (Erykah Badu, appealing) at the Women's House of D (detention), a monolithic minimum-security prison in south Manhattan. Known to Tommy only as “Lady,” she becomes the boy's worldly criminal mentor, the Magwitch to his Pip.

Amid all the clichés of nobility and nostalgia, it's hard to take Tommy seriously as a real-life kid on the brink — he's too composed, too generous and too impervious to the blindsides of life. Even when confronted with a tragic death, his posture is that of frazzled bemusement, as if he were confronted by a impossibly challenging math problem. Conversely, Duchovny gropes too openly for our sympathies, demanding tears and laughter in chaotic, five-second spasms.
For audiences who feel like they don't get enough wholesome, politically correct sentiment in their cinematic diet, “House of D” will be like a much-needed insulin injection. For everyone else, this Dickensian fable will hardly live up to their great expectations.