“The Last Kiss” starts with four nearly-thirty-year-old guys (a big point is made about them being 29) facing their late-arriving adulthood with various degrees of panic. Michael (Zach Braff) and his girlfriend of three years, Jenna (Jacinda Barrett), announce to Jenna’s parents that she is pregnant. At the wedding of their friend, Michael starts to freak out at the apparently immutable trajectory the rest of his life will follow: kid, marriage, house, and, well, it’s never really spelled out what it is. It is not the quality of it that scares him, but the finality of it, so he plays along with a flirtatious college student, Kim (Rachel Bilson), who, if nothing else, represents a departure from that picture perfect trajectory. Meanwhile Chris (Casey Affleck), cannot handle the pressures of having a wife and young child, and Jenna’s parents (played by Blythe Danner and Tom Wilkinson) deal with their own crises.

The movie is uniformly well-acted, and the story of Michael and Jenna is involving, but all the characters are stereotyped by gender. All the young men are panicked at the idea of marriage and kids, while all the young women are eager to settle down and start raising a family. The only exception is Izzy, the man who has an unhealthy obsession with his ex-girlfriend. It would have been nice for at least one guy to find the idea of getting married and having a family – at the age of thirty, no less – less than terrifying. I also found it hard to buy that cute, sexy, 20-year-old college student Kim would so eagerly pursue Michael, a fairly geeky older guy with nothing in common with her. And yet I did find myself caring what happened to Michael and Jenna, and the movie also deals with their relationship and its problems in a believable and uncompromising way.