If you can manage to stay awake through the narcolepsy-inducing 'Sleepwalking', you'll probably be left with the vague impression that the writer, director and majority of the actors were experimenting with a strange version of method-acting in which the title of the movie becomes the means of delivery.

Yip, it's boring, contrived and a waste of your valuable time.

Joleen (Charlize Theron) and her daughter Tara (AnnaSophia Robb) are kicked out of their home when Joleen's latest boyfriend is bust for growing marijuana. An emotionally immature and lonely woman, Joleen is more interested in fulfilling her own unquenchable need for acceptance than raising her daughter.

Homeless and poor, the two descend uninvited on Joleen's brother James (Nick Stahl), a quiet construction worker, struggling to make ends meet.

In less than a day, Joleen inexplicably disappears leaving James to care for her daughter. James can hardly care for himself, let alone a 12-year-old girl, and it isn't long before social services remove her from his care.

Riddled with guilt, James agrees to Tara's plan to run away and the two set out on the road, with very little money and no destination. When they run out of money, they make their way to James' father's (Dennis Hopper) farm. Forced to face his hostile father and the abuse of his childhood, James eventually confronts his demons and wakes from his life of 'sleepwalking'.

Writer Zac Stanford has taken familiar ingredients and thrown them together in the hopes of creating a poignant script. The result, however, is a series of unanswered questions and a slightly creepy, but nevertheless mind-numbingly dull, approximation of human suffering.