Director Sam Mendes, who explored the darker side of American life in his Academy Award-wining American Beauty and more recently in Revolutionary Road, takes an uncharacteristically sunny road in the very smart, very offbeat Away We Go.

No, it’s not a biography of Jackie Gleason, even though the title uses the same words the Honeymooners star opened his variety show with every week on TV. Away We Go is about a cross-country search undertaken by a couple to find a place they can call home and to raise their soon-to-arrive baby surrounded by loving, understanding friends. This is not, as Away We Go continues to point out in very funny and goofy ways, as easy as it sounds. Soon they’re bouncing from Colorado to Arizona to Wisconsin to Montreal to Miami on a quest that begins to seem next to impossible.

Away We Go is a fresh, quirky look at modern life with all the foibles and emotional complexities in the spotlight. Burt (John Krasinski of TV’s The Office and a 2001 Brown University grad) at first seems a layabout with little ambition, whittling his time away in a mountain cabin in Colorado, content in his shaggy hairdo and mismatched clothes. He lives with longtime girlfriend Verona (Maya Rudolph of Saturday Night Live), a book illustrator, who is expecting their first child. The slightly goofy looking Burt tells Verona that he wants their unborn daughter’s “childhood to be Huck Finny” and indeed Burt seems to be trying to reach that goal in his own life as well, although we discover that he actually sells insurance futures — insurance for insurers — over the phone.

Burt wants to get married. Verona does not. Nevertheless, they believe at the start of Away We Go that everything is in hand and securely in place for their impending blessed event.

But then Burt’s too-hip parents (Jeff Daniels and Catherine O’Hara), who are the only reason Burt and Verona had moved to Colorado in the first place, announce that they are moving to Belgium for three years and won’t be around to help with grandparent duties for the first crucial years of their granddaughter’s life. It’s a crushing announcement that sends Burt and Verona scrambling to find surrogate helpmates from among their long lost friends and relatives.

The script, by married-to-each-other novelists Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, turns into an amusing collection of sketches, with the kind of off-center kookiness that has become a hallmark of social comedies such as Little Miss Sunshine. This is the kind of movie in which Verona, looking every day of her six-month pregnancy and then some, is humiliated by a group of airline clerks who look at her in disbelief and weigh whether they should allow her on board the airplane because women who are eight months pregnant are not permitted to fly.

It soon becomes clear that most of the folks from Burt and Verona’s past with whom they renew acquaintances in hopes that at least one of them will be welcoming and supportive, turn out to be a collection of oddballs who are caught up in their own mishandled, misshapen lives. In less cautious hands this could have resulted in an over-the-top, too-cute catastrophe. But Mendes has his large cast play it straight, each person firmly believing in his or her nutty ideas. Suddenly Burt and Verona seem like the most normal people on the planet.

They start in Phoenix where they are greeted by Verona’s former colleague, Lily (a hilarious Allison Janney), who blurts out outlandish insults at her two unhappy children, both of whom are sitting within earshot, assuring the appalled Verona and uncomfortable Burt that the kids don’t hear a word she says, although we can see differently. As they realize that Lily’s belittled husband is another victim of her sharp tongue, not to mention the fact that they are broiling under Phoenix’s summer heat, it’s not long before Burt and Verona decamp to visit her sister, Grace (Carmen Ejogo) in Tucson. The women share a lovely sisterly moment in a most unlikely spot — a bathtub in a bathroom showroom — that allows them a mellow reflection on the lives of their late parents. But here, too, they realize things have changed in the relationship and it’s time to move on in their ongoing odyssey.

They have an unsettling and very funny encounter in Madison, Wis., with Ellen (Maggie Gyllenhaal), Burt’s childhood “cousin” who now spells her name “LN” and who lives with a very laid-back hipster. LN’s inane ideas about child-rearing, which include breast feeding one of her sons who is old enough to walk and talk, not to mention LN’s phobia of baby strollers, send Burt and Verona fleeing, but not before a very funny encounter between one of LN’s sons and a red stroller.

Next up is Montreal, where old college classmates have filled their home with a multi-cultural rainbow of adopted children, but whose private calamities still leave Burt and Verona feeling empty inside. Then it’s on to Miami to console Burt’s brother (Paul Schneider) who is a mass of tears as he tries to raise his children after his wife inexplicably left him.

Away We Go is alight with both happy moments and sad, the idiocies of life and the woes of reality. There’s also a good measure of sweet introspective honesty, the best example of which is played out on a child’s trampoline late at night in a Miami backyard. All the while Burt and Verona, played appealingly and with sympathetic understanding by Krasinski and Rudolph, try to find a place to call home. Good thing. They seem like strangers in a strange land.

Where and how they find a place to call home is not so surprising in hindsight. But its discovery gives the film a glow and a welcome grounding in reality after all the bizarre things that we have witnessed.

****Away We Go

Starring: John Krasinski, Maya Rudolph, Jeff Daniels, Catherine O’Hara, Allison Janney, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Josh Hamilton, Carmen Ejogo, Chris Messing, Melanie Lynskey, Paul Schneider.

Rated: R, contains sex, profanity, adult themes.

mjanuson@projo.com