Debuting Sept. 27, 2013, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s “Don Jon” paints a vivid picture of modern relationships amidst playful Italian-American stereotypes, but to what avail?

Levitt plays the title role of “Jon”, a standard late 20s/early 30s bartender from New Jersey. Jon’s days are dominated by trips to the gym, cleaning his apartment, spending time with his “boys” and attending church and family dinner on Sundays. His nights are given to the pursuit of a single goal: taking home a different women every night and maintaining his “streak” of never leaving the bar alone. All in all it’s a fairly standard study of the average 20 something male. The movie gets interesting when the audience is informed that Jon prefers watching pornography to having sex with real women. Apparently watching porn allows Jon to “lose himself” in a way that he can’t with women. Then comes “the dime piece”, played by Scarlet Johansson, in the form of “Barbara”.

Fast forwarding a bit, we get to the overall issue of the film: Barbara catches Jon watching pornography after they had sex. Now comes lie number one as Jon promises her it was a one-time-only thing. Now he has to watch his porn on a mobile phone while he’s not with this “dime piece”. In comes “Esther”, played by Julianne Moore, who ends up catching Jon watching his adult films in class. Jon returns home to find Barbara looking through the history of his laptop, she confronts him about the porn he’d watched that day (somewhere in the ballpark of 46 sites) and breaks up with him. Jon has a pseudo-breakdown, and must reorder his life to discover happiness

In all honesty, I’ve been a fan of Levitt’s for years, but I would not advise paying theater prices to see this one. If you’re in the mood to laugh at uncomfortable Italian stereotypes and bad New Jersey accents, give it a shot, but I’d advise curious viewers to wait ’till it’s available to stream via Netflix or Amazon Prime.