The loose and amiably meandering lo-fi style of writer-director Jamie Adams has borne creative fruit in the past, and I enjoyed his previous film Black Mountain Poets with Dolly Wells and Alice Lowe. But Wild Honey Pie defeated me despite some of the talent involved. It is marooned in its own weird, self-conscious, actorly inconsequentiality and is neither properly funny nor satisfyingly serious, flaking out after 88 long minutes of improv-wittering.

Jemima Kirke (from HBO’s Girls) plays Gillian, a playwright who lives in a seaside town with her laidback husband Oliver (Richard Elis), a part-time DJ; in the midst of struggling with rehearsals for the local Shakespeare production she is directing, Gillian travels to the big city for a meeting with Gerry (Alice Lowe) an artistic director who claims to be interested in producing her first play – but is clearly attracted to her. While she’s away, Oliver feels a spark with her old friend Rachel (Sarah Solemani).

Then Gillian finds herself in a situation with Matt (Brett Goldstein), a sort of sketch-comedy figure, and the resulting scenario is completely improbable given how Kirke never looks as if she finds him in the least fanciable or interesting.

The absence of anything resembling a point to any of this need not have been a problem if the issue of tone had been settled and we could somehow believe in Gillian and Oliver and their fraught marriage. The soufflé rose well enough in Black Mountain Poets. But not here.