No doubt CQ would never had been made had Roman Coppola not been his father Francis’s son, but it’s too bad it enters the world burdened with that patrimony. Otherwise critics might have seen it as a charming, smart, flawed but promising debut from a talented young filmmaker instead of dismissing it out of hand as a vanity production. Neither does its premise, a film by a young filmmaker about a film by a young filmmaker, the reflexive tyro’s downfall, bode well. Jeremy Davies, however, brings some greasy-haired wistfulness to his performance as Paul, an American naïf in 1969 Paris editing the godawful Barbarella-esque Dragonfly, a sci-fi cheapie about a gorgeous secret agent (lanky and coy Angela Lindvall) in the year 2000. He’s also making a film diary of his own life that’s full of black-and-white close-ups of sink drains and that his girlfriend, Marlene (Elodie Bouchez), correctly dismisses as boring and self-indulgent. Unlikely circumstances make him the new director of Dragonfly, and the two films, sometimes cleverly and not always pretentiously, blur. With Gérard Depardieu, Giancarlo Giannini, and Jason Schwartzman in funny bit roles, CQ summons up some of the exuberance, the play, and the self-importance of the auteur era, evoking films from Godard’s Alphaville to Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, and its ingenuous energy at times overcomes its derivativeness.