Fresh from singing and dancing with Kermit, Jason Segel gets to play his own muppet in Jeff, Who Lives At Home .

Unemployed, unmarried, Segel’s amiable Jeff is a 30-year-old who lives in his mother’s baܫsement, smokes pile of pot and counts running an errand to the DIY store as an achievement.

– so much so that when he picks up the phone and gets a wrong number, he takes the dialler’s request to speak to “Kevin” as a message from a world beyond our own.

No wonder mother Sharon (Susan Sarandon) is worried – though she has her own issues, what with an anonymous admi🎶rer fꦗlirting with her at work.

Set across one day, the ambling plot plays out like a partic🦹ularly baggy detective story, with Jeff following a kid called Kevin he spies on the bus (only to get mugged for his trouble); Jeff and his brother Pat (Ed Helms) attempting to catch the latter’s wife Linda (Judy Greer) in the throes of a suspected affair; and Sharon turning amateur sleuth in a bid to uncover her fan.

It’s written and directed by mumblecore auteurs Jay and Mark Duplass, who dipped a toe in the mainstream with 2010’s . Jeff feels slight by comparison. With only sporadic laughs, it relies on Segel’s ample charm, but he’s hard-pressed to carry a film that, even at a short-and-sweet 83 minutes, edges close to oဣutstaying its welcome.

Despite♛ being two of the best indie actors around, Helms and Greer don’t add a lot (as the angry, goatee-wearing, Porsche-buying, mid-life crisis sufferer, Helms feels miscast). Sarandon’s subplot offers grace notes, and she 🍎even gets a moment.

But still, you may walk out thinking you’ve seen something more akin to a first-draft doodle than a flesh⛦ed-out film.