The audience won’t be suicidal

The suicidal characters of Goran Dukic’s road comedy “Wristcutters: A Love Story” dwell together in a mirthless afterlife that looks very much like waking life, if all bright colors were washed away and the landscape were strewed with detritus. A recent addition to the populace is Zia (Patrick Fugit), a pouty gen-Xer who killed himself in a fit of breakup blues only to find out that his girlfriend, Desiree (Leslie Bibb), had also made a fatal leap, though for very different reasons.

Piling into a wasted station wagon with a self-electrocuted Russian rocker (Shea Whigham) and a sign-defacing young woman (Shannyn Sossamon) who claims to have died by “accident,” Zia treks across this purgatory in search of Desiree.

Dukac’s feature debut, adapted from a short story by Israeli writer Etgar Keret, is studiously obeisant to the school of existential deadpan as practiced by Jim Jarmusch and Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki. He arranges his actors in sullen-faced tableaux against yawning backdrops, roping in Jarmusch regular Tom Waits at one point to play a commune denizen with magical inclinations. It’s borderline parody of a kind of fey filmmaking popular at crunchy-granola festivals, but the counterfeit aesthetic is ultimately outshone by the life-affirming message.

“Wristcutters: A Love Story.” MPAA rating: R for language and disturbing content involving suicide. Running time: 1 hour, 28 minutes. In selected theaters.