Can a hard-living loser with the face of a smashed pumpkin find redemption in the arms of a real-life earth angel? That is the silly question floating through “Passion Play,” a fatuous noir-flavored reverie with allegorical pretensions written and directed by Mitch Glazer. Set in the desert at places with portentous names like the Dream Lounge, “Passion Play” wants desperately to be something like an artier, more metaphysically ambitious answer to mood pieces like Alan Rudolph’s “Trouble in Mind.”

Its down-and-out palooka, Nate Poole (Mickey Rourke), is a jazz trumpeter turned small-time crook employed by the prim and dapper crime boss Happy Shannon (Bill Murray). Nate runs afoul of Happy after sleeping with his wife and narrowly avoids assassination in the Mexican desert by Happy’s enforcer (played by Chuck Liddell, the former mixed martial arts fighter).

Nate stumbles upon a traveling carnival whose prime attraction, Lily (Megan Fox), a beautiful bird woman with real wings, is exhibited as a sideshow. The property of the carnival’s owner, Sam (Rhys Ifans), Lily flees with Nate in a pickup truck. Before long Happy catches up with Nate but agrees not to kill him, in exchange for Lily, who ends up posing in a glass cage in his private nightclub.

You might reasonably assume that any movie starring Mr. Rourke and Mr. Murray would have to have something to recommend it. But aside from a haunting musical interlude, in which Mr. Rourke, with pathetic ineptitude, mimes playing a trumpet, “Passion Play” is barely palatable. Mr. Rourke mopes through much of the movie on the brink of tears, and Mr. Murray’s killer is a snippy cipher. Ms. Fox’s nonluminous Lily remains a standard male fantasy of a damsel in distress until the inevitable “Wind Beneath My Wings” moment lofts the movie into a never-never land of hokey sentimentality.

Because this tonally wobbly film (Mr. Glazer’s directorial debut) wants to cast a romantic spell, it is an all-or-nothing proposition. Conjuring magic, it goes abracadabra and snaps its fingers, but nothing happens.

“Passion Play” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has nudity, sexual situations (poorly staged) and violence.

PASSION PLAY

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Written and directed by Mitch Glazer; director of photography, Christopher Doyle; edited by Billy Weber; music by Dickon Hinchliffe; production design by Waldemar Kalinowski; costumes by Lisa Jensen Nye; produced by Daniel Dubiecki and Megan Ellison; released by Image Entertainment. At the Quad Cinema, 34 West 13th Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. WITH: Mickey Rourke (Nate Poole), Megan Fox (Lily), Bill Murray (Happy Shannon), Kelly Lynch (Harriet), Chuck Liddell (Aldo) and Rhys Ifans (Sam).