-By Frank Lovece

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With a genuine sweetness and warmth that belies the gear-grinding of its individual parts, this paean to Pittsburgh pal-hood and twenty-something blue-collar romance draws intermittent laughs from its comedically talented cast. She’s Out of My League also makes an argument for that elusive, much-talked-about filmic quality called "chemistry," a subject in which, like its high-school graduate pals working hourly-wage airport jobs, it's earned maybe a D+.

To be fair, that's only for the two leads, Jay Baruchel and Alice Eve, who individually show talent and poise—yes, even Baruchel, a sort of geeky young David Duchovny who plays a more laconic, self-aware version of Don Knotts' famously slight, put-upon loser-nerd who ultimately triumphs—but whose scenes together in this average-guy-dates-hot-girl comedy keep feeling like missed connections. When the ravishing Mariel Hemingway can give the fat but sweet and funny John Candy a look that says she's falling in love with him in Delirious (1991), or the va-voomy Marilu Henner does it equally convincingly with the nebbishy but smart and funny Wallace Shawn in one of the last episodes of TV's "Taxi," then certainly it's doable for an actress to feel her heart and eyes melt for a less-than-prepossessing romantic male lead, and convey that to an audience. That never happens here.

Yet the movie's secondary chemistry works, with airport TSA screener Kirk Kettner's (Baruchel) buddy-bros, who serve more as his emotional heart-trust than they do any intellectual brain-trust: fellow screener Stainer (an engaging T.J. Miller), whose self-involved oafishness eventually strips off to show his lionhearted loyalty; ticket-clerk Devon (the always welcome, tack-sharp Nate Torrence), the pop-culture geek who landed a wife; and mechanic Jack (Mike Vogel), the handsome guy who feels more at home with his high-school misfit friends than with more socially acceptable sorts. Their onscreen interactions have the totally on-target teasing and shorthand subtext of lifelong friends and self-chosen family, and in those moments, the movie has soul to spare.

As Molly MacLeish, Eve—the daughter of actors Trevor Eve and Sharon Maughan, who play her character's parents' here (Maughan having been a pop-culture figure through a 1980s soap-opera series of coffee commercials with Anthony Stewart Head)—comes off as a professional with good comic timing. But there's never a moment where we feel a genuine connection between this beauty—a rich, nice, gorgeous law-school grad turned high-end party planner—and the out-of-shape, unintellectual, average-job beast. Other characters, including Molly's refreshingly non-jerk ex, the model-handsome pilot Cam (Geoff Stults), keep mentioning that Kirk's funny. But he's not—most of his dialogue, when not self-deprecating, morose or trying to dodge embarrassment, isn't interesting or witty in either a down-home or an autodidactic way. We keep hearing that Molly likes Kirk, and she gives some pro-forma rationale in one scene, but not a bit of it is convincing.

That might not turn out to be a problem for this poor-schlub fantasy, which may find an audience of poor schlubs just as the last year's contrived middle-aged woman's fantasy It's Complicated found enough of a sad, sighing audience to become a hit. Pittsburgh fans will certainly love how first-time feature director Jim Field Smith caresses that underrated and very lovely city. And the guy-bonding stuff works—even, remarkably, in a relatively discreet crotch-shaving scene that you wouldn't think would need two guys.

The film also offers entertaining performances from a delightfully bemused Krysten Ritter as Molly's bitch-talking business partner, and Kyle Bornheimer as Kirk's bullying a-hole of a brother, who doesn't overplay the role into caricature and comes off as a more believable monster for it. One grumble: They couldn't give the talented Debra Jo Rupp anything better to do than to play a colorless mom?