“Sunshine Cleaning” is a film best described as “aggressively indie,” a film so determined to appear unique, quirky and dark while still comforting audiences that it manages to become nothing more than shapeless and middling. Because of such audience favorites as “Juno” and “Little Miss Sunshine” (“Sunshine Cleaning” borrows heavily from the latter), the state of independent film has become unadventurous, overly smug and condescending toward its “real” characters. For a film trying to shed light on working-class women and their local niche business, to just wrap things up in a neat little package is like covering up a gunshot wound with a Band-Aid.

Speaking of gunshot wounds, the rambling, uneven narrative of “Sunshine Cleaning” opens with a brutal suicide in a gun shop, and Mac (Steve Zahn), a philandering cop, is perturbed at just how much a cleanup crew for the crime scene is costing the police department. That night, he meets the movie’s heroine, Rose Lorkowski (Amy Adams), at a seedy hotel for their weekly date night. Rose, a financially strapped maid who dated Mac in high school, needs some quick cash to help move her bright son (Jason Spevack) to a school where he won’t be so bored with classes (and therefore, lash out at his teachers with weird behavior). Mac suggests that she pour her sanitary skills into the business of crime-scene cleanup. Morbid wackiness ensues.

Most of that wackiness exudes from Norah (Emily Blunt), Rose’s aimless sister, who lives in an unkempt hovel with her father (who else but Alan Arkin), a shifty fellow with a thousand get-rich-quick schemes. Mad at the world and always hanging out with the wrong crowd, Norah hesitates to join her sister in this new entrepreneurial venture because of a traumatic occurrence from her childhood. However, she caves in, realizing her other option is to live with an old man and have less than $100 to her name.

Off they go, scrubbing up blood and appendages with toothbrushes and elbow grease. In one genuinely funny scene, Rose and Norah have to figure out just where to place a blood-stained mattress, finding that the dumpster in the middle of a trailer park is suitable enough. Director Christine Jeffs finds humor in the aftermath of such terrible messes by basically presenting these situations as matter-of-fact little snippets of these women’s working lives. Jeffs does not dwell on the inherent sadness of the situation, even when Rose has to comfort a woman who just found her husband dead in the next room.

A problem throughout the film that neither the actors nor the filmmakers know how to properly solve is a refusal to actually engage with the characters on anything but a superficial level. As good as Adams and Blunt are, especially when they are required to leave themselves vulnerable to the camera, they are only given ill-fitting quirks and little bits of personality to help define their characters. They never really flesh them out adequately, instead relying on their own charms as actresses. Arkin has the market cornered on short-tempered, old coots, and Clifton Collins Jr. is memorably sweet as a sympathetic cleaning supplies salesman.

“Sunshine Cleaning” is entertaining enough and features pleasant performances, but its bland script and uneven tone make it fade from memory almost as quickly as lemon-scented cleaner evaporates on a kitchen counter.

“Sunshine Cleaning” was written by Megan Holley and directed by Christine Jeffs.