Everything’s Gone Green, the first feature script from noted Canadian author Douglas Coupland (Generation X), is the ultimate love letter to his native, beloved Vancouver.

Gorgeous scenery and Lotusland jokes abound, as Toronto actor Paulo Costanzo (Joey) stars in this slacker rom-com as a Vancouver man who gets dumped and loses his job on the same day.

“Ryan, you’re not motivated to awaken the warrior within,” his ex tells him.

His boss, meanwhile, is concerned about the suicide-laced poetry she has discovered on his computer.

“Let me guess, you don’t like it here,” she says, before offering to suspend him with psychological counselling.

Hope arrives in the form of a hard-to-get set dresser named Ming (Steph Song), whom Ryan meets cliched Vancouver-style at the site of a beached whale at Sunset Beach.

Ming, however, has a scheming boyfriend Bryce (JR Bourne) who wants to exploit Ryan’s new soulless job as an interviewer/photographer of provincial lottery winners with a Japanese mafia money-laundering scheme.

Yes, the plot is slight, the script itself isn’t bad and the cast is mostly winning.

Costanzo, previously a character actor in such fluffy teen-driven U.S. features as Road Trip and Josie And the Pussycats, is completely likeable in his first leading-man role.

But Song, while cute enough, is pretty bland and doesn’t present much depth to her character.

Bourne — most recently seen as a duplicitous slimeball in 24 — is very good at being bad, while Susan Hogan and Tom Butler as Ryan’s cheerful parents and Gordon Michael Woolvett as his entrepeneurial best-friend Spike are also memorable.

“Middle class? C’mon, you look at me and you think mini-vans, wife-swapping and sheep dogs?” says Spike, whose booming milk-delivery business is a front for something else.

Everything’s Gone Green’s biggest challenge remains whether many on this side of the Rockies will see it.

Vancouverites, however, will eat it up.

Trust this transplanted West Coaster when I say Toronto director Paul Fox — the same man behind 2005’s creepy, claustrophobic thriller The Dark Hours — got it right.

The opening shot over the credits is a glorious bike ride through the former Expo lands to the West End. And lovely, lush locations range from Coal Harbour to Grouse Mountain.

Also figuring prominently are references to life coaches, offshore-owned and leaky condos, kayaking, American film and TV production, Mandarin — “the language of tomorrow,” as it’s called in the film — plus fasting, dieting and home invasions.

The lottery culture, sadly, is understood from Vancouver to St. John’s.

“For a lot of people, the dream of winning is the only thing that gets them through the week,” says Ryan’s new boss Alan (the excellent Aidan Devine of The Dark Hours).

Also cool is the all-Canadian indie soundtrack that includes music from Sloan, Jason Collett, Final Fantasy, The Golden Dogs and The Fembots. And there is some mighty hilarious set decoration, from a killer-whale phone in Ryan’s office to two ceramic German shepherds in one lottery winner’s house.

For the record, it sure is nice to see Vancouver play Vancouver on film — for once.

(This film is rated 14-A)
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