In the bitterly funny 1989 film Heathers, Christian Slater is flipping through a copy of Moby Dick owned by one of his victims, underlining deep and meaningful passages for the police to pore over after he kills her. He stumbles across the brilliant idea of underlining the single word "Eskimo," and it's one of the funniest moments in the film when the flamboyant preacher at the funeral comments on the meaning of such a word, with all its connotations of cold and barren loneliness.

Now, the makers of Heathers knew exactly how deliriously silly and overwrought it was, to find such meaning in the word Eskimo. Michael Winterbottom, the director of 9 Songs, apparently didn't get the joke. This is obvious because, when his love-shocked protagonist needs to recover from the loss of his girlfriend, he goes to Antarctica. Only the subzero temperatures, the endless drifts of snow and patterns of ice, and the howling wind can express his sense of loss. And if the rest of the film weren't so soul-suckingly dreary, I'd have laughed my ass off at the adolescent pretension involved in the framing scenes that take place there.

But the rest is dreary and pointless, drainingly so, and for a movie that consists basically of sex, rock 'n' roll, and drugs (in approximate order of frequency), that's pretty pathetic. This film is 69 minutes of a talented director—Winterbottom directed such films as The Claim and 24 Hour Party People—wanking. Yes, he's wanking. In his attempt to be formless and avant garde, he's made something that's masturbatory (but only for him, despite all the hardcore sex) and meaningless.

Matt (Kieran O'Brien) is in love with Lisa (Margot Stilley), a free-spirited, wraithlike, underfed American living in England. He loves her because of her boyish body, her arrogance, and her selfishness. The two of them go to rock concerts and fuck. Sometimes they have inconsequential conversations, but not very often. They go on a trip, and their relationship starts to show signs of strain. She informs him that she's going back to the United States, but only for a year. He goes to Antarctica and wallows in his self-pity.

A scholar whose name I can't remember (I'm told it's Linda Williams in her book Hardcore) once wrote that hardcore porn and musicals follow the exact same pattern of buildup and payoff. This film has taken that to heart (it even has a money shot). It consists almost solely of music—admittedly pretty good concert footage—and fucking. Yes, I use that word, because that's what it is. It's not making love, or whatever euphemisms one might use. It's fucking: hardcore, show-everything, penetration, camera-in-the-crotch fucking. It's also incredibly tedious. Who'd have thought that sex could be portrayed in such a boring manner. The film, shot on handheld digital, has all the production values of a porn video, except with worse lighting. It leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination, and hence becomes solely about the plumbing involved.

There's a bit of a story, and maybe it would have been better without it. (But probably not.) Lisa is a caricature, the kind of Woman-with-a-capital-W that male directors are always going on about, all the while showing that they either secretly (or not so secretly) despise women or fear them or don't understand them. Lisa leaves Matt for the exact same reasons that he listed as his reasons for loving her. Are we to feel bad for him, nursing his ego in deepest Antarctica? He's been little more than a petulant child up to the point of departure. He takes her to a strip club and leaves in a huff when she enjoys a lap dance from a female dancer a little too much—but I thought he loved her sense of adventure? He's upset when, in the course of making dinner, he discovers her in the bedroom masturbating with a vibrator. This is somehow supposed to be a betrayal, but in fact it's just a steaming crock of adolescent horseshit on the part of the filmmakers. Matt is upset because his man-meat isn't enough for his girl, and it damn well should be, right? What über-masculine, unenlightened garbage!

Is Winterbottom so cro-magnon that he can present this straight, without even the hint of editorializing or satire? I think a filmmaker—perhaps one whose head isn't overinflated with self-worth—could have made a delightful and sexy satire on avant garde films, while using most of the same material. Not very long into the film, I found myself counting the titular songs, happy with each concert that the end was a little closer. I raged in internal debate over whether the non-diegetic music counted (it doesn't). There are two good scenes shot at a live Black Rebel Motorcycle Club show, and a pretty good one at a Dandy Warhols show. But most of the rest of them weren't that good, and even the good ones didn't make the film any good, or even close to worth the price of admission. This is the worst film that I have ever paid to see in a theater.