Prior to her surprise appearance to collect a Camera d’Or (honoring directorial debuts) at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, I knew nothing about Miranda July, save a nodding acquaintance with her name. (It turns out she directed a Sleater Kinney video, shared a story credit on The Center of the World, and appeared briefly in Jesus’ Son.) So when she showed up, unexpectedly, before a matinée screening of her film, Me and You and Everyone We Know to declare earnestly, adorably, that those of us in the theater were her “18 favoritest people in the world,” it made me wonder: Can this woman be for real?

Having seen the film, I think the wide-eyed-and-earnest thing might not be completely an act. July is a self-described “performance artist,” and her approach to cinema feels simultaneously a little arch and a little naive. Me and You and Everyone We Know is a sex-and-relationships yarn sprinkled with in jokes from the art world, notably a cynical curator with a poo fetish. The title itself is a metaphor for a kind of artistic vision — a 14-year-old boy looks at a page printed margin-to-margin with periods, commas and semicolons and sees a bird’s eye view of all the people’s he’s met — as well as for a certain vision of sexual development.

Characters in Me and You are male and female, young and elderly, and they’re all grappling with relationships in their own way. Seven-year-old Robby (Brandon Ratcliff) is cruising Internet chat rooms without the first idea what the conversations he takes part in really symbolize. Meanwhile, the 30something Christine Jesperson (Miranda July), who runs a one-woman car service called Eldercab to make ends meet, is making clumsy passes at Robby’s dad (John Hawkes), a shoe-store salesman who’s a little freaked out by the attention. One of her Eldercab clients, whom she drives to a shopping center from his nursing home, is romancing a woman who cuts off the relationship when she declares that she expects to be the next one at the facility to die. There’s also a pair of neighborhood girls, 15 or 16, engaging flirtatiously with a local lunk who correctly sizes them up as jailbait, but still propositions them by posting signs in his window. Their story eventually intersects with that of Robby’s older brother. Still, at times, the stories become so disparate that Me and You feels almost like an anthology film, even though the vignettes are in orbit around a common center.

The performances are good, but they’re almost uniformly ingratiating, insistent on smoothing out any rough edges in the material — you’re given no reason to dislike anyone (save the uptight museum director, and the film eventually warms even to her). You can describe that as a generosity toward the characters or a bad case of indie timidity. If Miranda July just wants to be liked, and, because as long as you’re watching her movie you’re one of her favoritest people, she’s careful not to make any sudden moves that might scare you off. Scene to scene, Me and You and Everyone We Know is one of the mildest things I’ve ever seen. Its aesthetic is defined to a great extent by the super-clean HD cinematography and an omnipresent, New Age-y score by Michael Andrews (Donnie Darko) that conjures the ironic , these-skies-are-bluer-than-blue spirit of David Lynch. The irony operating here is that July’s film isn’t ironic at all; it embraces its own mood music.

Would this have been more fascinating as cinema with sharp corners sticking out? Probably not. Imagine Vincent Gallo working in a shoestore and rebuking the advances of the delicate, waifish July, or a cringing, drooling Philip Seymour Hoffman soliciting blow jobs from teenagers and you’re watching a story collapse under its own weight. Instead, she’s made a film so airy and consumed by emotional potential — and a yearning for evidence of the magical, or at least the highly felicitous, in daily life — that it threatens to float out of reach.

Once the credits rolled, July’s ambitions crystallized for me — all these characters don’t necessarily signify the different people suggested by the film’s title, but rather temporal stages of emotional development. If July’s experience is as a solo performance artist, then maybe Me and You and Everyone We Know is an attempt at time travel, loosely representing a person’s journey from sexual innocence to youthful curiosity, middle-aged disconnection and finally death in the magical simultaneity of screen time. What’s missing, notably, is fulfillment, which is represented perhaps by what we don’t see in the film — sexual experiences between people who care about one another, or the early years of marriage. Maybe July’s forgotten those moments, or maybe she just finds consummation itself less intriguing, less charming, than the continued physical and emotional scramble toward it.