Every generation gets the degeneration it deserves. For the current crop of late teens to 20s -- if the films of Gregg Araki are to be believed -- that consists of the requisite nihilism and hedonism wallowing in the detritus of '70s pop kitsch and '90s fringe cultural inanities. Following in the footsteps of Araki's previous overrated strident and pretentious diatribes -- The Living End, The Doom Generation, and Totally F***ed Up -- is Nowhere, an irritating melange of sex, drugs, and crass cliché.

The film opens appropriately with a banal masturbatory fantasy -- Dark (James Duval) has his polymorphous, onanistic shower interlude interrupted by his grotesque mother (Beverly D'Angelo). This spurs him on to his idle, apocalyptic day, which includes glib exchanges with his promiscuous true love Mel (Rachel True), her girlfriend Lucifer (Kathleen Robertson), his gay wet dream Montgomery (Nathan Bexton), and various other witless X-ers. What follows is an updated American Graffiti-style series of parallel couplings, misadventures, and tedious broodings about the meaninglessness of it all, punctuated by the odd alien abduction. Culminating in a gratuitous ripoff of Alien by way of warmed-over David Lynch and David Cronenberg, Nowhere doesn't succeed in getting even that far. At the Harvard Square.