Edward Zwick’s Love and Other Drugs is an offbeat romantic drama set in the world of pharmaceutical sales. Jake Gyllenhaal’s Jamie Randall is a sex-addicted stud whose effortless ability to bed women anytime/anywhere gets him fired from a peppy job selling electronics equipment to women of all ages during a bustling 1996 economy. Jamie’s seduction skills are given greater consequence at his new position hawking drugs for Pfizer.

Partnered with old-hand Big-Pharma peddler Bruce Winston (Oliver Platt), Jamie utilizes his mythologized appendage to help better place samples of Zoloft on the back-room shelves of doctors all over Pittsburgh. Sleeping with doctor office receptionists has fiscal benefits. He has no ethical qualms about posing as a medical intern to “shadow” Dr. Stan Knight (Hank Azaria), a hard-sell who shares a similar free-spinning moral compass. It’s a line-crossing stunt that introduces Jamie to Parkinson’s disease-suffering patient Maggie Murdoch (Anne Hathaway) via her exposed spider-bitten breast. Jamie and Maggie are commitment-phobes whose combustible sex life together is articulated to preclude any actual devotion of the heart.

Based on Jamie Reidy’s memoir Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman, the by-committee script (from Charles Randolph, Marshall Herskovitz and co-writer/director Edward Zwick) bounces between comedic, dramatic and indie genre conventions. This film is a romance at heart, and that is where it truly delivers