FEVER Pitch was a better book than film, and the same has happened again with another Nick Hornsby transfer from print to celluloid, although High Fidelity is an improvement

Whereas Hornsby himself did the Fever Pitch script, maintaining its very English flavour, High Fidelity has been taken over by American writers, and faithfully re-located to Chicago, albeit with British director Stephen Frears behind the camera.

Frears has re-united with John Cusack - Hornby fan and indie music enthusiast - after their fruitful partnership for The Grifters a decade ago.

In turn, Cusack is back on the Chicago underground beat after Grosse Point Blank; he knows his location and his music, and this perfectionist's involvement stretched to co-producing the movie and having a say on the script. Unfortunately, he ends up more involved than the viewer, because the leading characters are self-obsessed, self-pitying and lacking in redemptive sympathy.

Cusack is used-record store owner Rob, the movie's soliloquising narrator, who has handled his record collection with more care than his used girlfriends. Perennially troubled, lethargic Rob can sustain a long, loving relationship with vinyl and his own ego but not alas with his women, and he has just lost his latest disaffected partner Laura (Iben Hjejle), sending him on an odyssey to ask each of his Top Five Failed Relationships what went wrong.

The rejected, dejected Rob is one of those annoying types always more in love with a girl once spurned than during a relationship. A plight in flight, he is self-absorbed rather than self-deprecating and so how welcome it is to hear one ex, Catherine Zeta Jones's Charlie, tell him exactly what she thought of him; a backdated payback paid in full!

Meanwhile, Cusack and Hjejle spar throughout without chemistry on a rollercoaster ride to a lovey-dovey ending, making High Fidelity an unstable, unappetising and lumpen, even pointless romantic comedy: sometimes twisted beyond bitter, then too sugary; sometimes dark as Joy Division, other times as sunshine-bright as Steps; real then unreal.

Far better is the comic depiction of obsessive, lonely record collectors: not only Cusack's wry Rob but his part-time assistants and fellow perennial list-makers Dick (Todd Louiso), the quiet Belle & Sebastian fan, and Barry, the loud prankster who likes to chew the fat over music minutiae and refuse to sell records he deems unworthy. If only High Fidelity's romantic core could have been so hip and cool, assured and whimsical.