To be sure, New York's art scene - with its clad-in-black gallerists, its attitudinal hangers-on, its moneyed collectors, and most of all, its variously self-promoting, insecure, insufferable artists - is ripe for movie satire.
(Untitled), however, is not that movie, not that satire.
Starring a brooding Adam Goldberg as a composer of new (and extremely dissonant, listener-unfriendly) music and Marley Shelton as a fashionably bespectacled gallery owner, the film veers between cutting parody and cliche, threatening to become interesting at any moment, but never quite doing so.
Goldberg's scowling Adrian leads a trio of musicians through a jolting cacophony of pieces written for piano, reeds, and percussion - and the percussion includes clanging buckets, crumpled paper, and breaking glass. Shelton's Madeleine is cool, classy, and confident - and she has the luxury of supporting a parade of avant gardists because her boyfriend, Adrian's brother, paints palatable abstracts in demand by corporate clients.