The suburban black comedy “The Details” begins with Tobey Maguire having a piano dropped on his head. That’s new, but though there are some fresh elements to this film, it winds up feeling like a would-be “American Beauty” that does not take on that film’s depth or resonance and can’t quite make its dramatic and comic elements work together.

Maguire is a sexually frustrated obstetrician who has a lot of spats with his wife (who, played by the always-excellent Elizabeth Banks, is under-written) and becomes obsessed with the raccoons who keep ripping up his lawn. Much of the early part of the movie is played for campy laughs as this dopey doc approaches the boiling point. To let off steam, he hangs out with a med-school friend (Kerry Washington, whose character also never gels) and plays basketball with an older buddy (Dennis Haysbert) who has a serious, life-threatening kidney disease but is nevertheless an upbeat, mellow and kindly soul. (Twenty years ago he would have been played by Morgan Freeman, and maybe that’s not such a compliment.)

The element that really starts to throw the movie (written and directed by Jacob Aaron Estes) off track is the extremely broad performance of Laura Linney, a fine actress who nevertheless plays a neurotic cat lady living next door at such a shrill pitch and with such loud clothes that, whenever she’s on screen (and she is a more important character than any of the others except the doctor) the movie becomes a screechy satire. As goofy as the Maguire figure is at the beginning, when he acts a bit like a spoof of a 50s sitcom dad, we’re gradually meant to learn to see him as a flawed but very human soul confronting serious moral dilemmas (mostly brought on by his own misbehavior). It’s hard not to think of how much better Kevin Spacey was in “American Beauty,” though. And as the movie gets darker and darker and darker and the laughs dry up, I found that the campy comedy from earlier in the film made it hard for me to get emotionally invested in the doc’s plight.