The black-comedy genre is as tricky as the hip-urban-singles genre is by now hackneyed. Combining the two is apt to be either an ingenious effort or a big yawn. Just a Kiss just manages to avoid the latter, but it never lives up to its ambitions or its pretensions. Writer Patrick Breen and director Fisher Stevens have fashioned an intermittently clever roundelay of musical beds, thirtysomething Manhattanite style, with flash-forwards and flashbacks that detail each character’s predicament. Cribbing Richard Linklater’s Waking Life animation technique, characters morph into surreal day-glo versions of themselves whenever emotion is heightened. But lacking original characters and a more urgent story, the technique is pretentious and distracting.

The actors do their best with sketchy roles. Ron Eldard is a fidelity-challenged director of TV commercials who beds the suicidal girlfriend of his best buddy, the improbable star of a peanut-butter TV commercial. Kyra Sedgwick is likable as Ron’s more grounded but just as immature lover; Marisa Tomei creates a few sparks as a psychopathic bowling-alley waitress with a sadistic streak.