At its best, “Starlet” is an enchanting sequence of events with pleasant-looking actors, charming coloring and interesting cinematography. Directed by NYU graduate Sean Baker, the film is about a 21-year-old, long-legged bombshell, Jane (Dree Hemingway), who discovers a large sum of money in a thermos she buys at 85-year-old Sadie’s (Besedka Johnson) yard sale. Jane befriends Sadie, presumably to decide what to do with the money she found — namely whether she should give it back or keep it for herself.

Verging on cinema vérité, “Starlet” is shot and directed in a spontaneous guerrilla style. The entire film is a collaborative effort. According to the director, actors were allowed to give input and improvise where they saw fit. The screenplay was co-written by Baker and Chris Bergoch, and the concept was a combination of two of Baker’s old film ideas.

It is possible that this combination and collaboration might be responsible for the diluted nature of the film’s plot. The abundance of ideas convolutes the director’s personal intention so much that “Starlet” becomes entirely incoherent. Overall, the film feels very trivial, maintaining an incongruous lightheartedness even when the subject matter becomes dark and serious. This is likely a consequence of its generally soft aesthetic, bare sets, lagging dialogue and, most of all, vapid characters. For the majority of the film, the characters don’t really say much at all. Their sentences are short and often incomplete, and the little that they do say is empty and irrelevant to the story’s progression.

The only scenes in which the dialogue doesn’t lag are the short, seemingly improvised ones — usually the scenes of fiery arguments. Although these scenes do boost the film’s pace, their lack of direction is evident, and the dialogue doesn’t quite come together because the characters’ words sometimes seem unnatural and out of character.

Because the characters of “Starlet” aren’t very well defined, it is clear that the creators are more focused on plot and events than character development. However, even the vagueness of the characters isn’t neutralized with enough action, as not much happens in the story. The viewer must fill in the gaps and imagine elements and scenes or implicit meanings that are not actually evident in the film to form some sort of concrete meaning or purpose.

This is not to say that Baker should have beaten his audience over the head with “Starlet’s” meaning — rather, he should not have given the audience so much responsibility to find the purpose in his own film. Perhaps the reason for this is because the purpose wasn’t even clear to the creators. Too many themes in a film, ironically, can rob it of its meaning.

A version of this article appeared in the Thursday, Nov. 8 print edition. Glennis Sposto is a contributing writer. Email her at [email protected].