HE WANTS TO TOUCH YOUR BUTT: Jennifer Aniston and Steve Zahn.

A made-in-Oregon (but not set-in-Oregon) indie comedy, Management is an effort to establish Steve Zahn as a romantic leading man, a venture that is just about as successful as the attempt to substitute Portland for Baltimore. Zahn has been delivering idiosyncratic, nuanced supporting performances for some time, adding his own special flavor of eager pathos, and he deserves a breakout role. Next time, he should make sure the character doesn’t so strongly resemble Norman Bates.

Zahn plays Mike, the night clerk who lives behind the front desk of the Kingman Motor Inn on a roadside in the Arizona desert (actually Madras, Ore.). He is skittish, dotes on his mother, and is embarrassed around other women. When Jennifer Aniston’s traveling saleswoman takes a room, he knocks on the door with a complimentary bottle of champagne. He returns the next night with another bottle. He hits on her, feebly: “I like your butt.” She says he can touch her butt. Thankfully, he does not proceed to murder her in the shower. Instead, they have sex in a laundry room (because this is Jennifer Aniston in indie mode, where she is required to have sex with weird people). She leaves. He follows her to Maryland. For reasons I will never understand, she does not take out a restraining order.

It was around this point I began to wonder: Is this guy supposed to be creepy? If not, why isn’t he supposed to be creepy? This is a problem endemic to Sundance circle-quirks (it also ruined the recent Paul Dano-Zooey Deschanel vehicle Gigantic): The hero is so disturbed and awkward that you worry he might hurt somebody. In the case of Management, Mike proves to be the human equivalent of an unleashed puppy, so earnest and incorrigible that Jennifer Aniston can’t help but love him. (In this way, the movie works as a kind of sequel to Marley Me.) Debut director Stephen Belber teaches Mike some life lessons—including a fairly funny stint at a volleyball-centric Buddhist monastery portrayed by Portland’s Japanese Garden—and Zahn tries his best to make him the rare arrested-development character that actually matures. Mike even turns the family motel into a soup kitchen. I still wouldn’t use the showers, though. R.