THE LATEST film by Woody Allen is Annie Hall with all the freshness taken out. In Anything Else, he tries to extend the shelf life of his screen persona by hiring a younger, more marketable actor — Jason Biggs from the American Pie movies — as his alter ego.

Biggs plays Jerry, a twenty-something New York writer who’s in therapy and toying with a novel about a godless universe. He’s also torn between his needy agent (Danny DeVito) and unfaithful girlfriend (Christina Ricci).

The film isn’t really a romantic comedy, more a stand-up tragedy with jokes thrown in for pacing. And Allen’s depiction of current-day New York twentysomethings — quoting Dostoevsky and raving about Bogart and Billie Holiday — is laced with too much nostalgia to ring true; multiculturalism for this couple is probably a side order of couscous.

Allen plays Jerry’s comedy-writer mentor, who inspires and poisons Jerry’s mind with advice about life and relationships. The film is less about modern love and more about railing against the avalanche-onset of age while Allen’s sense of New York as a lost paradise is almost Miltonic.

Biggs hems and haws his lines but seems uneasy as a Woody substitute and lacks chemistry with Ricci, who mostly whines and acts petulant. But then the screenplay feels like a first draft, full of characters who keep getting dropped and picked up again (the wonderful Stockard Channing is wasted as Ricci’s lush of a mother).

In Annie Hall, we knew that Allen and Diane Keaton’s characters weren’t meant for each other, but we rooted for them anyway. Here there’s no one to root for. In the end, the film congeals into a weary retread of Allen’s earlier work.

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