Warner Bros. Pictures

Drew Barrymore and Justin Long star in "Going the Distance."

Long-distance romance is a worthy subject, ripe with comic and dramatic potential.

How then, has the new Drew Barrymore movie managed to make it so boring?

"Going the Distance" stars Barrymore as an aspiring journalist named Erin and Justin Long as a bottom-rung New York record label employee named Garrett.

They meet cute in New York while Erin is a summer newspaper intern there. At the end of the internship, she returns to grad school in California. She and Garrett struggle to sustain their genuinely loving bi-coastal relationship, but then Erin is offered a reporting job in San Francisco.

Should she take it, or should she return to New York to be with her boyfriend? With newspaper jobs fast disappearing, she might have to wait tables to survive.

Should Garrett, whose line of work also seems economically threatened, move to San Francisco to be with Erin?

Do we care?

Not if it depends on "Going the Distance."

The movie dutifully pushes the buttons that make long-distance romance so hard: jealousy, uncertainty about what one's lover is up to when the phone isn't answered, the well-intended but sometimes misguided advice of friends and family, the question of whose career is more worthy of priority, etc.

But when Geoff LaTulippe's script pushes the buttons, not much happens. I mostly blame the curiously off-kilter performances and, by extension, the direction of Nanette Burstein.

Only Barrymore consistently animates her character. Long seems particularly lifeless for someone whose character supposedly has found the love of his life. It doesn't help that Long looks about a decade younger than his costar.

Charlie Day overplays his part as Garrett's roommate and close friend. Jason Sudeikis, as another of Garrett's pals, hardly registers except for a scene in which he rationalizes his retro mustache. The fact that Day and Sudeikis screw up so many decent lines makes you wonder what better actors might have made of "Going the Distance."

Some viewers might be startled by the film's foul language. It's not the vulgarities themselves, which have been standard movie fare since writer/director Judd Apatow and his stable of male actors came to prominence. The difference is that it's the women who utter most of the obscenities.

One barroom outburst by Erin likely will draw laughter from the film's young adult target audience. In the largely empty theater at Friday's first screening, however, it only seemed sophomoric.

But young women do talk that way these days, so credit the movie with being current. That doesn't make it any better.