Do you remember that guy on the airplane who you thought was really cute? Or that girl you were secretly eyeing at the airport? What if you kept running into that person again and again, over the next seven years? Would you eventually fall in love with each other?

Of course you would-at least if someone were shooting a movie about it. You know from the very beginning of the movie-or even earlier, if you saw the preview-that Oliver (Ashton Kutcher) and Emily (Amanda Peet) are going to eventually end up together. Then, whether this movie is going to be enjoyable depends on how identifiable, believable and lovable the characters and their sporadic affairs are. And "A Lot Like Love," while verging on the threshold of being too drawn-out and clichéd, still manages to make us feel an emotional attachment to the characters and evokes the silly yearning for that all-too-forseeable ending with familiar drama.

The theme of this movie is coincidence. After their adventurous encounter in an airplane lavatory, Oliver and Emily run into each other the next day on the streets of Manhattan. They decide to have a cute afternoon together, and, despite Emily's insistence that Oliver already has three strikes-1) she had to make the first move; 2) he doesn't play guitar; 3) he has a wrong horoscope sign-and is "nothing like her type," we definitely see romantic sparks and chemistry between them.

And indeed, we discover something exquisite happening between them over the next seven years. Although the sporadic nature of their relationship is not fully justified to an all-knowing audience-"Why can't they just stay together? They're gonna end up together anyway"-thanks to all those years, we see the characters transform from a recent college graduate and a wild rock groupie to two adults who have learned and now understand a little about what life is all about. Their stories are not at all glorious. In the end Oliver is back at his parents' house, flat broke, and Emily never becomes the actress she aspired to be. But their stories are so real and ordinary that, just like we do with our lives, while we laugh and smile, we also feel the unavoidable pangs and heartache of life and love quite poignantly.

The supporting characters in this movie are also wonderful, and Oliver's deaf older brother (Ty Giordano) is an especially fine addition to the sense of human vulnerability and reality that the movie portrays. Although he is not developed enough to the audience's satisfaction, this movie would have been a lot drier had it not been for him. It is he who sums up the point of the movie in a sentence: "This, right here, is your life." The seven-year-long, sporadic, on-again, off-again affair between Emily and Oliver cannot be fully appreciated until the audience momentarily tries to forget the obviousness of the ending and simply enjoys each special moment and day that the movie so prettily portrays.

The beautifully-shot afternoon they spend together in New York, the moment that Oliver rushes over to Emily to save her from the loneliness of starting the New Year without a kiss, the road trip while singing "If You Leave Me Now" with Cheetos in their mouths, and of course Oliver's performance of "I'll Be There for You" on his electric guitar, asking Emily to take the first strike back (the movie, if anything, has a wonderful array of familiar songs that we like, from artists such as Third Eye Blind, Travis, Jet and The Cure) are all wonderful moments of real life and something "a lot like love" that we all recognize.

The movie has many flaws, one of which comes from sharing too many similarities with "When Harry Met Sally" while lacking its ingenuity. Kutcher's acting is also subpar compared to Peet's, who wonderfully pulls off Emily's complete transformation from a punk to a mature, sensitive twenty-something woman over seven years. Oliver also changes over time, but only subtly, and this imbalance between the depths of the two main characters is only overcome by the overall realness of what happens between them. "A Lot Like Love" is a great romance film if you can rid yourself of negative feelings about the obviousness of the ending and the unavoidable patchy feeling of a movie made up of episodes from a drawn-out seven-year affair. "A Lot Like Love" is unpretentious and real, a charming portrayal of the imperfections of life and the hesitant, "what-if" quality of those feelings we know that are a lot like love.