n his first English-language film, Hong Kong avant-pop auteur Wong Kar-Wai shoots American dive bars in gorgeous hues, and he even pulls out a few solid moments of acting from David Strathairn, Rachel Weisz and Natalie Portman. But Norah Jones, making her big-screen debut, while admittedly cute and friendly, has depressingly little going on beneath her striking façade.

My Blueberry Nights is basically a conventional road movie that charts a haphazard emotional pilgrimage, but with decidedly mixed results. The "In the Mood for Love" director's signature tear-smeared, lovesick visuals are present in large quantities, but this time his stylistic tricks and odd situations feel like more mechanical.

The script and performances can't match up to the stunning visuals.

After a few long food-porn shots of glistening blueberry pie, we meet Jones' Elizabeth storming into a run-down New York diner owned by a British expat, Jeremy (Jude Law), to drop off a set of keys. She knows her boyfriend is a regular at the café, and she also knows he's been cheating on her, so she asks Jeremy to give him the keys the next time he shows up.

Soon, she and Jeremy – who is quietly hoping his own girlfriend will show up - are meeting up regularly at closing time to commiserate about lost loves while eating slices of his blueberry pie; he serves her pie that always seems to be leftover at the end of the evening. To try to sort out her life and her feelings, she shortly takes off on a cross-country trip, using different versions of her name in each city - Lizzie, Betty, Beth.

At that point, My Blueberry Nights becomes a cross-country odyssey with Jones sending Law no-return postcards about her adventures. He has no way to contact her. Waitressing her way south, she finds herself in Memphis, where we meet small-town drunk Arnie (David Strathairn) and his bitter and promiscuous wife Sue Lynne (Rachel Weisz), and later, it's on to Reno where she meets a Dixie-broad (a peroxided fizzy Natalie Portman), a poker player pretending she doesn't care about her estrangement from her gambler father.

Cinematographer Darius Khondji (Se7en, Funny Games) gets some gorgeous visuals out of window-refracted neon, moody lighting and exquisite framing. And eclectic guitarist Ry Cooder's moody jazz backdrop adds a dreamy, romantic melancholy that distinguishes Wong's best films.

The casting of Norah Jones in the lead role was probably the biggest risk involved in this film project, and gives an ignorable performance in her first starring role. Strathairn and Weisz bring some much needed oomph to their characters. But it is Chan Marshall (aka Cat Power), who packs a large performance into her little scene as Jude Law's returning girlfriend, Katya. It's just a shame that the script and performances can't match up to the iconographic Americana romanticism visuals.