James Deen checks his email while Lindsay Lohan acts in The Canyons.

There is sadly very little that needs to be said about The Canyons, a dull, clumsy Hollywood-as-dream-crusher melodrama that gained unduly heightened buzz thanks to its casting (Lindsay Lohan and porn star James Deen) and writer (lifelong Doomed Youth enthusiast Bret Easton Ellis). I hesitate even to call it a "bad movie" because I don't think it actually is a movie. I think a season of The Hills became sentient and made a softcore porn parody of itself.

In a plot that could have been yanked from any number of movies generally found on Cinemax at around 2 a.m., a sleazy rich-kid producer named Christian (Deen) finds out that his lazy, chain-smoking aaaaaactress? girlfriend, Tara (Lohan), is having an affair with an aspiring actor named Ryan (Nolan Funk). Christian then sets about systematically destroying both of their nonexistent careers and lives, just because he can. There's some sex and some blackmail and some drugs and some violence, and several scenes of people sitting at restaurant tables where no one is eating - all of it captured in the rather disinterested manner of a midseason episode of One Tree Hill.

Actually, it's not just the story that could have been yanked from any number of the softcore romps that straight guys watch on mute after their girlfriends fall asleep to Downton Abbey; this movie looks just as cheap and slapdash as any Bedroom Eyes or Secret Sex Games. In fact, the one thing worth noting about the film is its utter lack of style. It's not lush or frenzied enough to convey Hollywood excess, but not sparse enough to be deliberately sterile - which leaves it hovering somewhere around "utterly pedestrian". And considering that this is a setup we've seen dozens of times before, it's gonna take something a bit more visionary than setting the camera in the corner and turning on all the lights to stick the landing. Had the packaging of this limp little Hollywood noir been a bit flashier (or trashier, or campier, or anything-er), it might actually have worked. But when shot, edited and scored like a basic cable drama, it falls flat on its face.

Of course, the biggest buzz around the  movie has been the notoriously troubled Lohan - which is unfounded, because she's really not the problem here. She's dependable enough, with her Bart-Simpson-being-smothered-with-a-pillow squeak and permacig both in place. There are a few emotional moments that she sells quite well, and I don't think you can blame her for not being able to pull off ridiculous soap opera bits like almost knocking over a water bottle when she's sneaking around or thinking she hears someone approaching while she's in the shower.

Deen, on the other hand, is clearly at a disadvantage when not allowed to use his ticket-seller, and delivers a thin performance in a role that needs to be unnervingly snaky. Funk is fine in a rote "poor straight guy losing his way in the big bad gay city" role (this film is more obsessed with dick size and forcing straight men to have gay sex than most gay porn sites) but I wouldn't be surprised if he moves this Hustler White Lite to the bottom of his resume.

I will admit I didn't have high hopes going into The Canyons - while I'm a fan of many of Ellis's books, my confidence in the ability of Paul Schrader to interpret Ellis's particular brand of lip-glossed nihilism was shaky at best. But I did give The Canyons a fair shake. Maybe I was secretly hoping that the film would be an over-the-top, teeth-gnashing, wig-pulling bacchanalia that might at least restore some of Lohan's street cred and give us all something to livetweet to other trashhumpers. But this is no Sharknado. It's not even I Know Who Killed Me. And it's sure as hell no Showgirls. It's more like... I don't know, something that Tier 3 Baldwin might play a cop in.

It seems that the filmmakers were trying to say something about art and movies and power and porn as they relate to the next generation of Hollywood (the opening credit montage of shuttered movie theaters is as subtle as Lohan's eye makeup), but the movie lacks the teeth to give any indictment real bite. (I will also use these presumed lofty artistic ambitions as justification for the fact that they were able to get Gus Van Sant to show up for two minutes to play a therapist.) Unfortunately, The Canyons is too busy pointing fingers at the people it thinks are ruining Hollywood to realize that this dream factory goes down one bad movie at a time... including this one.