Benjamin Dickinson in Creative Control (Magnolia Pictures)

Creative Control is a stylish, unique piece of speculative dystopian filmmaking, set in Brooklyn at some indeterminate time in the near future. A Google Glass clone has become mainstream, and anxiety pills are even more stratospherically popular than now. Writer, director, and star Benjamin Dickinson has a good deal of visual panache, and he’s evidently fueled by copious angst about our cultural moment and where it’s headed. Overall, there is a fair bit more style than substance, which in some ways betrays the whole point of speculative fiction, but it showcases a filmmaking voice worth considering.

Dickinson plays David, a marketing associate who is working on a big ad campaign for a new anxiety relieving pill. Scenes depicting the weird mix of vapidity, confidence, assertiveness, and spinelessness that undergirds marketing meetings ring true, though they pass too quickly. The mechanics of the firm, the product, and really all of the nuts and bolts of this future Brooklyn seem a bit too vague and under-imagined.

The strength of the marketing scenes can in part be attributed to the presence of Gavin McInnes, the exiled cofounder of the holy grail of hipster branding, Vice Media. He plays Scott, one of David’s team members. A veteran of countless real-world marketing meetings on how to monetize hipness, McInnes lends credibility to the marketing scenes, oozing slickness and barely concealed hostility. The comedian-musician Reggie Watts plays himself and brings a vital boost of inspired mania as a creative guru, whose ideas don’t make much sense, but he has a lot of them, and he seems to have such an ownership of contemporary coolness that everyone has no choice but to nod in agreement with his trippy babblings.

David lives with his sweet, somewhat lost yoga instructor girlfriend, Juliette (Nora Zehetner). She is interestingly loopy, given to blaming her work tardiness on the planet Mercury being in retrograde. As David becomes steadily ground down by his job, she appeals to him to snap out of the life of wage slavery and that he’s killing himself with stress and pills. David treats her pleas as little more than half-baked hippy nonsense, loudly and meanly reminding Juliette that her yoga instructor salary won’t pay for their swank top floor apartment.

The movie never goes too long without a sex scene between David, Juliette, their lovers, or the lovers of several of David’s friends, most of whom are shallow peripheral characters whose name you are not quite sure of. The sex, always unsentimental, though often hyperstylized, lowers the stakes somewhat. The consistent, inevitable faux-resolution of all conflicts or incidents in sex scenes makes the movie feel too familiar. David’s banter with his mustachioed colleague Wim (Dan Gill) too often revolves around bro-dude sex talk.

Dickinson’s camera lazily follows his hipster characters around Williamsburg, from the Wythe Hotel to yoga studios to handball courts. The camera seems terminally disinterested in any of the action or dialogue, drifting along and conveying the same lack of focus or meaning that oozes from the characters, and from the story itself. We don’t learn much about what this future world is like, other than a familiar ennui and an overreliance on sex to solve existential issues. The main technological innovation seems to be a totally transparent smartphone and the aforementioned Google Glass facsimile. The main piece of technology on display is constant texting, which is, of course, already standard practice now.

It’s hard to shake the feeling that the primary message the filmmakers wanted to convey is how slick they are. Here’s a slow motion scene of David and Wim driving down the streets midday sharing a blunt, set to classical music, and a long, wordless scene of Wim dutifully and detachedly having doggy-style intercourse with his girlfriend while playing on his phone and still giving it to her good. A long rave scene in a nightclub following David’s and Wim’s drug-fueled prurience is basically a music video.

Beneath the self-serving coolness lies something of a capitalist critique, or at least a critique of our runaway train of techno-utopian consumerism fueled by medications. But the ideas and details of this dystopia are not examined enough to create any kind of critical attitude. In his roles as writer, director, and star, Dickinson brings to mind the director Shane Carruth, and they even look a lot alike. Both make offbeat, quasi-visionary films that could never be mistaken for anything but theirs. But Carruth, in Primer and especially Upstream Color, suffers from stuffing too many ideas, many of them quite rigorous and formidable, into his films, creating a chaotic disorientation that is a very tough taste to acquire. Dickinson, on the other hand, gives us something that seemingly has the trappings of a visionary film but without having enough to say to offer an actual vision. Despite its shortcomings, his film is still worth checking out for those looking for something different.