CALL ME a buzz squelcher, but Jonas Pate's Crash-y, tag-team, only-connect, only-in-L.A. drama Shrink draws its moral lines so heavily you can taste the chalk dust flying off them. Shrink begins solidly with a world-weary psychiatrist, Dr. Henry Carter (Kevin Spacey), dog-faced from sleeplessness and much puffing of the evil herb. Once he was a psychiatrist to the stars and the author of a book called Stop Feeling Sad; now he is a physician who needs to heal himself. The doctor has a roster of clients, a real workload: Kate (Saffron Burrows) and Evan (Joel Gretsch), a famous movie star/rock-star couple with child, are now on the verge of splitting. This couple, referred to as "Katevan" in the tabloids, is supposed to be as famous as Brangelina. Shamus (Jack Huston, John's grandson) is supposed to be Colin Farrell, an out-of-control Irish movie star unhappy with his work. Robin Williams plays Jack Holden (why not William Nicholson?), an aging movie star who quips that he needs to be sent to "Cockenders" for his adulterous tendencies. He is self-medicating with booze. Want more? Too bad, here they come: Dallas Roberts plays Carter's patient Patrick, a neurotic asshole of a motion picture executive, the Jay Mohr type. New patients include Jeremy (Mark Webber), who was the godson of Carter's father—a lawn-mowing nobody in this star-studded scheme, with hopes of writing a script someday. Though he's supposed to be Joe average, Webber plays Jeremy as if he had the lead role in a Sam Rockwell biopic. Lastly, working-class African-American girl Jemma (Keke Palmer) is seeing Dr. Carter for pro bono sessions of what seems like that "movie therapy" you've read so much about. Jemma won't talk to the doc about her problems or about the reason she has a cast on her arm from having tried to knock some sense into the mirror in her high school bathroom. So they go to the movies together.

Once upon a time, the man who linked high and low lives in L.A. was a private eye. Spacey's sardonicism would make a great late-period Philip Marlowe (in a remake of The Little Sister, say). Like Marlowe, Carter has a fateful mystery of his own to solve. And as in the case of Raymond Chandler's mysteries, the real killer is the city of Los Angeles itself. The dry, coyote-haunted hills, the smoggy sunrises and the affably brutal way people treat each other form the background for this comedy-drama. Taking up the bum's life—as Carter does, smoking herb in the parking lot—is a natural reaction to all that frenzied ambition. But the life-affirming, everything-to-all-people script keeps introducing new characters until, at the end, he is forced to act with all the aplomb of a man herding cats.

Yes, there's wit in Shrink. Playing a TV chat-show host, Gore Vidal pronounces the word "suicide" as if it were the name of a fine wine. Hard to imagine why a man that smart would have been so ill informed about his guest, though. Spacey's look of groggy melancholy is a reliable getter of laughs, and one short scene of Burrows sitting and eating ice cream makes up for a lot of heavy life affirmation in this tangled, tangled web Pate weaves.

SHRINK (R; 110 min.), directed by Jonas Pate, written by Thomas Moffett, photographed by Lukas Ettlin and starring Kevin Spacey, Mark Webber and Saffron Burrows, opens July 31 in San Jose at Camera 3.

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