More like "The Rule of Distraction," as Quentin Tarantino acolyte Roger Avary (Killing Zoe) returns to the screen with this jazzed-up but empty adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s homage to ’80s spiritual bankruptcy. Avary dumps the relentless contemporary pop-cultural references of the original, setting the roundelay of misfired desire in the generic cultural and moral wasteland of Camden College, a liberal-arts party campus somewhere in New Hampshire. Stumbling among binges, casual sex, and hangovers is Sean Bateman (James Van Der Beek), younger brother of Patrick, the cutthroat Wall Street broker featured in Mary Harron’s much more daring and pointed adaptation of Ellis’s American Psycho. Beyond getting drunk, stoned, and laid, cutting classes, and selling dope, Sean likes to eat and ponder who’s leaving love letters in his mailbox.

That’s the problem with all the characters in Rules: not satisfied with vapid hedonism, they’re occasionally stirred by the illusion of romance. So Sean thinks Lauren (Shannyn Sossamon) is the mystery lover, Lauren longs for callow Victor (Kip Pardue), Victor is off on a drug-addled orgy through Europe, Lauren’s bi-ex Paul (Ian Somerhalder) is smitten with Sean, and no one loves the girl in the bathtub. Avary conveys Ellis’s appearance/reality and unreliable-narrator motifs via broad irony, slick fantasy sequences, and a time-reversal gimmick that suggests a diabolical circularity. Hellish indeed, since the film is utterly pointless the first time around. (110 minutes)