America is infatuated with Steve Carell. As epitomized by his breakthrough turn as the “40-Year-Old Virgin,” he’s the dork we all know ourselves to be, dreaming the impossible dream only to trip over his own social awkwardness and pratfall back to reality. Yet Mr. Carell can transmit such tongue-tied sincerity that he wins anyway, turning his elemental loserhood into an asset as stunning as that beaky promontory of a nose. To borrow some terminology from VH-1’s smarmy reality series “The Pick-Up Artist,” Mr. Carell embodies an Average Frustrated Chump who transforms himself into an unlikely babe magnet through the magic powers of emotional revelation. It’s a brutal, humiliating, agonizing process, but the actor’s pack-mule capacity for punishment becomes endearing. We feel his pain, because he already feels ours.

So it’s even more painful to see that symbiotic goodwill already beginning to be squandered on seasonal fluff like “Dan in Real Life.” It’s not a badly made movie, and is precision-scripted to generate warm fuzzies, mildly vulgar cackles, and waterworks in equal doses. But it’s a perfect example of the kind of romantic comedy that Hollywood manufactures way too often. Every plot point can be anticipated a half-hour in advance. There’s a brief break about every 20 minutes for some kind of musical interlude. Unlikely soul mates meet cute, yet must contend with obstacles for another hour-and-a-half. The casting requires really interesting actresses (Juliette Binoche, Emily Blunt) to behave either as sexy enigmas or trampy distractions and stuffs actors into walking clichés. Does anyone honestly need to see John Mahoney as yet another kindly, grumpy, patriarch? Didn’t this guy do Mamet once? And Dane Cook playing a jackass kid brother? How novel!

Such annoyances aside, “Dan in Real Life” is a full-tilt Carell show. Even if you hate this kind of movie, the actor proves himself a virtuoso of anxiety, willing to make a doofus of himself in a way that Tom Hanks never would. The movie rises and falls on the finely attenuated tremors of his discomfort.

Mr. Carell plays a widower raising three daughters, two of whom have hit puberty and have become strident and demanding in their desires to do normal teenage things like drive a car for the first time and hang out with boys. But Mr. Carell’s noble Dan, who pens a newspaper advice column, could profit from someone else’s thoughts on family. As the youngest of his girls tells him, “You’re a good father but a bad dad.”

He’s also an utter mope. So when the gang takes off to woodsy Rhode Island for a big family retreat, even his mother (Dianne Wiest) doesn’t want him sitting around all day with his sad beagle eyes. She ships him off to pick up the papers. The last thing Dan expects is to meet a foxy, middle-aged brunette at a seaside bookstore. The impromptu love interest — Ms. Binoche, of course — jump-starts Dan’s heart again. Trouble is, she’s seeing someone else. And as Dan soon discovers when he arrives back at the ancestral log cabin, it’s his younger brother (Mr. Cook).

The rest of the movie plays around with the tension caused by this budding love that dare not speak its name. Mr. Carell moons and swoons and sweats, and eventually so does Ms. Binoche, who gets to spend a lot of time in formfitting exercise pants doing things like salsa aerobics and gazing soulfully from under her tousled mane. There are about 150 familiar bits from the Chick Flick 101 handbook, with an occasional booster shot of coarse guy humor. Perhaps the one inspired moment is also the silliest: a family sing-along to made-up verses of a song dedicated to a local girl known unaffectionately as “pigface.” The family has set up Dan on a blind date of sorts with this old hometown acquaintance, who has developed a crush on him through reading his columns. The punch line? She’s no longer porcine; she’s Emily Blunt, wearing a skirt as tight as her character is loose.

In the good old days of screwball comedy, a screenwriter might have done more with such a talented comic actress. Ms. Blunt walked off with “The Devil Wears Prada.” Here, she’s merely eye candy, as well as an excuse for Mr. Carell to revisit his barroom boogie moves, stirred by a few drinks into remembering he’s forgotten what sex ever was and now needs to refresh his memory. His Dan will find out soon enough, though not before more tears, a car wreck, a punch in the face, stern lectures from his daughters, and a painful rendition of Pete Townshend’s “Let My Love Open the Door.”

Dan’s performance of the song is an instant of sad-sack apotheosis, the moment that he wears his heart on his sleeve. Even if it’s as transparently contrived as everything that frames it, the scene transcends its prefabness through the disarming agency of Mr. Carell’s cracking falsetto. It’s a shame so much else in “Real Life” is so phony.