Director Patrick Stettner gathers an impressive cast for The Night Listener, headed by Robin Williams and Toni Collette along with veteran supporting actors like Joe Morton, Sandra Oh, and Rory Culkin. Intrigued by the premise and seeing that IFC had logged in as a producer, I anticipated an interesting character study at least equal to what Williams had delivered in the largely panned One Hour Photo. I should have paid more attention to the low buzz factor coming out of Sundance and the fact that Miramax was distributing it.

The 91-minute film drags like a Costner epic, largely due to its lightweight script. Much better suited for a 25-minute Twilight Zone episode (one of the forgettable ones), The Night Listener plays like low fat M. Night Shyamalan.

Williams plods through the plot as short story writer Gabriel Noone, who reads his creations over a syndicated late night radio show. Mined from his personal life, his listeners can follow his self-indulgent soap operas as they develop—the main one deriving from his long time lover Jess (Bobby Cannavale) and his successful battle to overcome AIDS. Lately, Noone can't write anything, as Jess is breaking up with him.* Note: his last name is intended as an early puzzle piece for the “mystery.”

That's where Pete (Culkin) enters the picture. A precocious adolescent writer with a horrific history of abuse, Pete is seriously (possibly terminally) ill. He is a huge fan of Noone's radio show, and was inspired to write his story because of it. Before long, Gabriel becomes obsessed with the 14 year old—calling him daily, discussing his personal life, and sending gifts and Playboy magazines to the lad. Questions arise about young Pete when Jess remarks that his recorded phone voice sounds very much like his adoptive mother Donna (Collette).

This causes Noone to investigate. Is he real or is this some elaborate prank? And if a prank, what is the real purpose behind the hoax? These are all timely issues considering recent hoaxes perpetrated on the New York Times, the infamous case of Stephen Glass journalistically duping the New Republic, and ubiquitous scams and hoaxes that occur regularly on the Internet.

Noone cannot locate records for the boy, but Donna explains that away by citing his juvenile status and how they have had to secret him away from his abusive parents. Eagerly anticipating a holiday visit to Manhattan, Noone is devastated when Donna cancels due to Pete's health (or possibly due to the fact that Noone's publisher now fears a hoax and has backed off a book deal for the adolescent). Determined to find out the truth, Noone hops on a plane to rural Wisconsin to track down the real story (or to collect material for his next short story). And that's where the meat of the film takes place—mostly at night, accompanied by a creepy psycho thriller score.

Unfortunately, the movie doesn't deliver much more than a thin story line. Williams does the best he can to create a nuanced character, but the script just doesn't offer enough details to make the audience care what happens to him. Williams just comes across as a lonely depressed man, only there to drive the plot forward. While the screenwriter continually strives for ambiguity, it would help if we got a little more back story to understand why the Hell this young kid's situation drives the protagonist to such lengths.

To be fair, the film does attempt to tie things up in the end with a similar moral lesson that the old Rod Serling television scripts consistently did back in the sixties. But it's trite when viewed in its full glory on the big screen. That's why this clunker of a feature would improve greatly with considerable editing to get it into a 25-minute time frame. The Night Listener still wouldn't provoke the same ironic enigmas that Serling routinely crafted, but it would spark much more interest than it will in its present format. This one is destined for a brief theatrical run while a small quantity of DVDs will languish unwatched on rental shelves in the coming months.