In the past few years, Orlando Bloom has been most notably cast to play a pirate, an elf and a Crusader. What do all these characters have in common? Long hair and a certain degree of mysticality. “Elizabethtown,” however, gives Bloom a chance to stop playing the hero and instead become a mellow soul-searcher.

Bloom plays Drew Baylor, a prodigy in the athletic shoe world who quickly plummets after his daring shoe design fails and costs his company close to $1 billion. As he is about to commit suicide, he receives a phone call about his father’s death during a family visit, prompting Drew to make the trip to Elizabethtown, Ky., to retrieve his body.

Enter Kirsten Dunst. She plays Claire Colburn, the lone flight attendant on his almost empty flight who won’t leave him alone to wallow in his misery. She even leaves him her phone number, and after an all-night call that ends with them meeting on the side of a road to watch the sun rise, she can’t stop popping up in his life. She is the whimsical free spirit who seems to magically appear at both the most opportune and inopportune times possible.

Although Drew tries to cope with his immense business failure, which is about to go public, and stay sane around his father’s Southern family, Claire uses her quirkiness to keep him out of a slump. She urges him to liberate himself from unresolved tension with his dad through one last road trip – with his father’s cremation urn. Their mutual attraction develops into a reluctant love, to the point where they try to break themselves up before they are even together.

“Elizabethtown” is very endearing and funny in some places, but the good nature of it does not change the serious material. It just doesn’t feel right to laugh at something involving a dead man, and the humor becomes slightly uncomfortable at times. It is not meant to be dark comedy, so the jokes are unsure.

The main problem with “Elizabethtown” is that it tells two very good stories that could be movies on their own. On one hand, there is the unique romance between Drew and Claire because they can’t stop being together, even as they push themselves away. On the other exists the domestic drama over his father’s funeral between Drew’s mother and sister and the small-town folk.

The stories work well exclusively, but when they are put together, the transitions between the two seem awkward. Just as the audience becomes situated with one plot line, the other resurfaces and brings the other to an abrupt end. The two stories finally mesh in the last 20 minutes of the movie, but up until that point, they don’t quite click like they should. They are both important stories in themselves, but director Cameron Crowe’s equal focus on the stories, even though they’re connected, throws more of the story off than if he had centered on one more than the other.

“Elizabethtown” offers a good romance and story of a son reconnecting with his father, but when these parts try to work as a whole, it struggles to bring the story home.