The reason many Americans find celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton despicable and loathsome, I think, boils down to the very low stakes in those persons' lives. Their problems are rarely, if ever, more than their outlandish habits coming to a droll confrontation of reality.

"What do you mean I have to sit next to someone on the subway? They might, like, talk to me."

The only abrasion these people meet are the imaginative constructs they put in front of themselves, and most of us find ourselves indifferent to the outcome altogether. The same scenario rings all too familiar throughout the entirety of Lola Versus, in which everyone is wrapped up in minutiae and nothing is important.

Lola Versus, is the sickly tale of a privileged New Yorker (Greta Gerwig) losing the love she's cultivated with her artist boyfriend (Joel Kinnaman) who succumbs to cold feet shortly after proposing. The dresses are returned, the cake is uneaten, and Lola reluctantly gets back on track to earning her PhD. Everyone rushes to Lola's aid in attempts to comfort and reassure her, including her lovably eccentric parents and her chronically single confidante, Alice (Zoe Lister-Jones, who also co-wrote the film).

Amidst all the hubbub of personal crises and momentary catastrophe, the title asks an implicit question to the viewer: What is Lola in perpetual combat with? With whom is she battling? Make no mistake: all of the demons at work in this movie spawn from Lola herself. She inadvertently hits the nail on the head while calling all the people around her "selfish," not realizing the irony in her vindications.

Gerwig is the actress of the moment, and arguably a force to be reckoned with as the new wave of young Hollywood stars levy for more time in the consciousness of filmgoers. She often plays characters that are sensitive and clumsy, trying to make sense of the daily chaos of life. But beneath all of those layers of humility is a strong and charismatic woman most of us root for.

Our lachrymose Lola, however, is quite the opposite. She shits on the people around her and learns nothing from the errors of her ways. The old maxims written by Aristotle about a plot changing our protagonist throughout the arc of the story were conceived with good reason, but the only things that change in Lola's world are superficial and unheeded. She even concludes that the answer to her woes is to "stick with doing me" for a while — resorting to the very thing she's been doing since the first minute of this film.

Lola Versus has a hopeful beacon, though, in Lister-Jones's character, Alice, who is self-effacing at every turn, and the only character for whom we hope the suffering comes to an end. Her real-life writing partner and the director, Daryl Wein, has a patient and unobtrusive way with his direction which allows all the good things about Gerwig and Lister-Jones's performances to bubble up to the surface. That's just it, though — Lola Versus just doesn't get much deeper than that.