April Burns, doe-eyed and peeved, is a model of self-made, dye-your-hair, leave-home, up-by-your-jackboots rebellion.

Played by Toledo s own Katie Holmes, slouching against type, and never more engaging, she has pigtails streaked with reds and blacks, and her face has that lemon twist of disgust worn by all people who are convinced the rest of the world is full of morons. Too much mascara rings her eyes, her bra straps show at all times, her jeans are vintage shabby, chopped off at the knee, meeting long, laced Doc Martens - hardly scandalous behavior, or even especially punkette-ish. But though thoroughly assimilated to lower Manhattan, April carries the faint whiff of suburbia. She s too poor to afford cable and bask in front of MTV, but one suspects a small stash of Jane magazines is piled in the back of her closet.

In another decade Bob Dylan might have written a song about her. (“April, she is no spring/Flowers can t buy her/Joy, her mother, she is no joy,” yada, yada; it works if you do the voice.) “I m the first pancake,” April says, explaining to her boyfriend (Derek Luke) why she s not looking forward to the arrival of her family. She s the first born, the black sheep. She came out psychologically misshapen, not easy to stack. But her mother (Patricia Clarkson) has breast cancer, and so she s going to cook dinner anyway and shrug through a reconciliation. When her stove won t light, she races around her building, going from apartment to apartment, begging neighbors for help, and arguing about her menu.

Cranberries, for instance.

“I like it from the can,” she says.

“Nobody likes it from the can,” she s told.

Admit it: You like it both ways. Pieces of April likes it both ways, be it cranberries or light family comedies. Sometimes it s authentic, full of twigs and crunch, direct from the salt of the earth to your tummy. Other times it s rubbery, predictable, and processed. Mostly it s charming and immensely touching, yet slight and self-conscious, with a dash of nasty to keep it all down. In a movie boiling with pungent food metaphors, most of them intended, that cranberry chat flies past the filmmakers unnoticed or ignored - and it s so useful for understanding the appeal and misconceptions of so-called edgy indies like Pieces of April.

First of all, that word, edgy - it s just so un-edgy these days, describing both the howling wail of Clint Eastwood s Mystic River and the digitally shot rawness of the images in Pieces of April. Edgy tends to mean a surface quality now, which poses a problem for audiences who sidestep anything remotely independently produced. When Pieces of April played Sundance last January a studio exec gave this distinctly un-edgy endorsement: “It s gonna be My Big Fat Lower East Side Thanksgiving!” Maybe so. Writer-director Peter Hedges, the author (and screenwriter) of What s Eating Gilbert Grape? and Oscar-nominated adapter of About a Boy, has the all-encompassing heart of an especially fine sitcom writer - and that is not a knock.

He couldn t write a Big Fat Greek Wedding if he wanted to; although his glibness might fit the bill. His larger talent is writing optimistic scripts with delightfully cranky, even dark dialogue that keep a story shy of sliding into sap. Clarkson is his ace in the hole, playing a woman whose chemotherapy and impending death have made her immune to being comforted, and brutally direct. At one point she tells her other, dutifully behaved daughter (the appropriately named Alison Pill): “You re just like me. Except for your slight weight problem.” So when the heartwarming arrives on schedule - when the brattish April and this snapping turtle of a mom reunite, however briefly - the tears feel earned. Just don t blink.

Pieces of April is one of the sweetest films of the year - bring the whole can t-decide-on-a-movie clan and no one will be disappointed - but it would be sweeter still if there were more of it. The movie wraps too soon - it just stops, in fact, as if the production ran out of time or money, or the cameras just quit working. Which may be the case.

Shooting for two weeks on a puny budget of $300,000, Hedges had no time to go back or second guess or rewrite, which may explain a variety of ills. Clocking at a scant 81 minutes, the movie takes the form of a short story, but employs too much ambition and distraction for such a thin frame, even splitting the narrative into three plot lines. Two work, one s unnecessary, even a little distasteful.

The first plot line is a beat-the-clock ditty as April enlists fellow tenement dwellers to help cook dinner for her skeptical family, hurtling toward her, down the New York Thruway, like a dysfunctional missile. The second follows the family members, who spend the film in their car bouncing around barbs and worries (and eating Krispy Kremes, just in case of a kitchen meltdown). Their trip seems super long, more of an odyssey, suggesting not only the literal distance between the estranged April and her family, but how far apart they are in general.

The third story, the misleading plot thread, finds April s African-American boyfriend going out to run errands, then disappearing on a suspicious mission. Luke, best known for Antoine Fisher, gives a tender, likeable performance, totally at odds with whatever Hedges is hinting. (Plainly said: He s playing the race card.) At best he s padding out an already tiny movie with another impending drama it doesn t need. Especially not when Pieces of April is a member of that occasionally glimpsed, subgenre of family film: the Thanksgiving movie.

Thanksgiving is drama incarnate, a holiday without a patriotic tether, or a religious underpinning, or even presents to fill time. Rather, it s a day for people to get together with the people they most likely do not want to deal with all at one time, or all in one place. There should be more good Thanksgiving movies. The best is Hannah and Her Sisters; Home for the Holidays has its moments. But Pieces of April uses the holiday itself better than any of those because Hedges mines not its greeting-card meaning but its awkward real-world meaning. “Once there was this one day when everyone knew they needed each other,” April explains to her Chinese immigrant neighbors. “Everyone knew they couldn t do it alone.”

First Published November 14, 2003, 1:11 p.m.