At the core of ‘XX/XY,’ mostly ZZZZ...

The independent drama “XX/XY” opens with the sort of hot stuff for which Penthouse Forum and French movies were invented. After crashing a party, a fledgling animator named Coles (Mark Ruffalo) lands in bed with two of Sarah Lawrence’s finest. The object of his lust is Sam (Maya Stange), one of those girls with melting eyes whom men pursue like heat-seeking missiles, while the object of his opportunism is her best friend, the querulous Thea (Kathleen Robertson). The three fall into bed only to have their erotic expectations dashed. One of the girls starts laughing and the other starts crying as Coles looks on, bewildered and disappointed.

The menage a trois quickly regroups. Coles and Sam pair off while Thea restlessly circles around them. Time passes, seasons change, scenes meander, and the couple burrows into an authentically grubby New York life. After about an hour’s worth of scenic and stylistic impetuosity, punctuated by interludes that shift into fast forward and slow motion, the lovers flame out in dramatic high style. At once, the story leaps ahead 10 years to the moment when Coles, now living in upscale domesticity with his longtime girlfriend, Claire (a very good Petra Wright), runs into Sam, newly arrived from another life in London. Sam has recently broken up with her fiance, creating an emotional rift into which Coles impulsively tumbles.

As the former lovers warily face off, the second half of “XX/XY” develops into a study of adult compromise and disappointment. Having tried and failed to become a successful independent filmmaker, Coles has settled into the gilded cage of lucrative advertising. He’s made the transition but not happily, as is evident from the lost look on his face when he sits amid the blindingly white furnishings of his enormous SoHo loft.

Something stirs inside Coles after he meets Sam again, but he’s uncertain whether it’s desire for an old flame or for the life that he didn’t lead. It’s an overly familiar setup played out by overly familiar types but, curiously, what invests “XX/XY” with its tension is that there’s no sense that Austin Chick, the film’s capable young director and writer, knows what he feels about any of this.

The film’s early freewheeling visual style indicates that Chick has a thing for the French New Wave (the title is a nod at Jean-Luc Godard’s “Masculin, Feminin”), and, like many of his contemporaries, he seems enamored of 1970s American cinema. The film that hangs most heavily over this one, in its split-story structure and uneasy male center, is Bob Rafelson’s “Five Easy Pieces.” In the 1970 dirge-like drama, Jack Nicholson plays Bobby Dupea, a piano prodigy who’s abandoned bourgeois privilege to work and rage among the working class. Coles has followed a more trodden path, having gone from dreams of directing movies to animating commercials. Unlike Bobby, who’s drifting on eddies of political and social unrest, however, Coles is adrift in prolonged adolescence. More crucially, unlike Nicholson’s dropout, he remains a figure of pathos.

Some movies are made because someone wants to get rich, others because someone wants to make art. Still others are made for pure entertainment or because someone had something that urgently needed saying. Paul Schrader claimed that his screenplay for “Taxi Driver” “jumped out of my head like an animal,” but these days it’s hard to find a movie born of such passion. The American indie scene is filled with tame, polite movies, agleam with professionalism and laden with characters that are content to remain willfully unaware of the world. There’s nothing necessary about the story and the filmmaking, and nothing essentially unpleasant and unrecognizable. Like Coles, these films are likable enough, but you could direct to them the same questions Sam asks of her lover: “Where are we going? What do you want out of this?”

In love with 1970s film style but not 1970s grit, Chick never pushes his characters anyplace that’s overly uncomfortable for either him or us. His ambivalence toward Coles is especially unfortunate since he’s always letting the guy off the hook when he should be making him squirm. When Coles tells Sam he wants to make “art-house movies no one will ever see,” the line sounds like a joke, but in the context of a film built on art-house allusions, and coming from the appealing Ruffalo, it’s just wince-worthy. Chick himself doesn’t seem interested in art-house obscurity; anyone who opens his first feature with a three-way sex scene, after all, knows how to sell his goods. That jive works wonders on college girls, but Chick needs to try harder if he wants to seduce the rest of us.

*

‘XX/XY’

MPAA rating: R, for sexuality, language and brief drug use

Times guidelines: Some nudity, racy sex, adult language and substance abuse

Mark Ruffalo...Coles

Kathleen Robertson...Thea

Maya Stange...Sam

Petra Wright...Claire

David Thornton...Miles

IFC Films presents a Robbins Entertainment in association with Intrinsic Value production, released by IFC Films. Writer-director Austin Chick. Producers Isen Robbins, Aimee Schoof. Director of photography Uta Briesewitz. Editors William A. Anderson, Pete Beaudreau. Supervising sound editor Robert Hein. Original music the Insects. Casting Ellen Parks. Costume designer Sarah Beers. Production designer Judy Becker. Music supervisor Lynn Geller. Running time: 1 hour, 31 minutes.

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