Jennifer Aniston has the looks, Lisa Kudrow the acting ability and David Schwimmer the wisdom to move behind the camera, while Matt ‘forever Joey’ Leblanc and Courteney Cox-Arquette have stuck with television.

But life after Friends has not been easy for Matthew Perry.

His big-screen outings are either best forgotten (The Whole Nine Yards) or already forgotten (its sequel), and his lauded return to TV – Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip – was cancelled after one series.

Yet his performance in Numb, while hardly a stretch, suggests that low-key is the way forward.

Perry wisely tones down the Chandler-isms to play Hudson, a neurotic screenwriter with abandonment issues whose state of ‘depolarisation’ means that the world around him feels unreal.

Career-wise, this must limit his experiences to draw upon and makes one wonder why he is a better script salesman than his face-stuffing writing partner Tom (Pollak).

He’s also remarkably ill-informed if he believes that smoking industrial-strength marijuana will alleviate his “never-ending anxiety”. Crackers.

Desperate to get on an even keel, Hudson sees a procession of shrinks and quacks who succeed in turning him from an unfeeling shell of a man into an over-medicated shell of a man.

Hudson’s luck changes when he and Tom pitch a script to movie exec Sara (Collins), something clicks. Open, adorable and drawn to depressives (her last boyfriend committed suicide), she’s just what his doctors couldn’t order.

But, with a combination of negativity and shoplifting, Hudson blows it. And a rebound fling with cognitive therapist Cheryl (Steenburgen) only adds to his problems; turns out she’s more screwed up than her patients.

Why women should throw themselves at Hudson is just one unfathomable piece of writer-director Harris Goldberg's thinking. But then he once made a male gigolo of Deuce Bigalow.

There’s a distinct whiff of Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy about Goldberg’s film, which is altogether less original and quirky than he thinks it is. It even trots out the old catch-the-girl-at-the-airport routine.

But despite the script’s mood-swings, Perry and co maintain the congenial atmosphere to ensure that Numb won’t leave you on a downer.

Elliott Noble