"World Traveler" is a movie for the few of you who couldn't get enough of being on the road with Billy Crudup in 1999's amiably aimless "Jesus' Son."

It's not nearly as good as that one was, but it does have the attractive, unreadable young actor wandering cross-country in search of something that — providing you can even figure out what it is — seems eminently not worth the time spent on the journey.

It's basically the "Flee Adult Responsibility, Find Freedom But Also Trauma Along the Highway" script that every film-school grad student writes, but most of which thankfully never make it to production. This is the second feature from writer-director Bart Freundlich, whose 1997 "The Myth of Fingerprints" was the "Dysfunctional WASP Family Thanksgiving Trauma" script that every undergrad film-school student writes.

In fairness, it should be said that Freundlich writes these things with a degree of character insight and social context that raises their level — but not high enough to break them free of the genre's dreary conventions.

Crudup plays Cal, a New York architect with a beautiful wife and a nice little boy. On the kid's third birth- day, Cal drives out of Manhattan in the family Volvo in search of . . . well, sex and drinking with strangers, apparently.

As the Volvo rolls west, Cal encounters a variety of folks who are encountered in films like this. There's the recovering alcoholic (Cleavant Derricks) he befriends at a construction sight in Pennsylvania, then almost knocks off the wagon. A comely young hitchhiker (Liane Balaban) somehow leads to an edgy encounter with a resentful school acquaintance (James LeGros) at a Minnesota airport.

Most intriguing is Dulcie (played by the director's significant other, Julianne Moore). He finds her dead drunk in some bar out West, comes to learn that she has roving instincts and family issues similar to his own, and just when he's thinking that Dulcie is his kind of gal, discovers that she's a real nut case.

This drives Cal to . . . well, something other than sex and drinking with strangers, but nothing any more interesting.

Freundlich arts up the trip with flashbacks (or are they fantasies?) to something bad that happened on a beach and glimpses of a threatening authority figure, along with lots of time-lapse photography and memory-shard cutting. Much autumn roadside is meandered through. Except for the always character-probing Moore, inarticulateness is a major motif.

The film's best joke is that Willie Nelson dominates all the jukeboxes in all the saloons Cal stops at. Cal doesn't like Willie Nelson much. Viewers will be happy to hear him, though.

"World Traveler" is rated R for scenes of simulated sex, male and female nudity and occasional use of strong, sexually related profanity, as well as some crude sexual slang. Running time: 104 minutes.