‘Only Living Boy in New York’ is a hot mess of indie cliches

Is there an indie cliché more grating than the callow young Manhattan know-it-all?

The sensitive writer who sports glasses that are supposed to make him look smarter than the himbo cast to play him? The guy who treats one woman dismissively as he pursues the unattainable beauty who’s ultimately not worthy of his adoration? The guy who finds a substitute father figure to dispense worldly advice in an acerbic tone?

Sound tediously familiar? Then you’ll want to steer well clear of “The Only Living Boy in New York,” which dutifully checks all of those boxes with a smugness its makers haven’t earned.

British hunk Callum Turner (“Queen and Country”) is the callow twentysomething at the movie’s center, Thomas Webb. Thomas is a fledgling writer who carries a chip on his shoulder about his father, Ethan (Pierce Brosnan), a publishing-company executive who dismisses his son’s manuscripts. He also carries a torch for Mimi (Kiersey Clemons), who is dating an absentee rock musician and has relegated Thomas to the friend zone.

Though he regularly comes home to dinners thrown by his mom, Judith (Cynthia Nixon), as a salon for her erudite friends, Thomas defiantly lives on his own in a Greenwich Village apartment. In the stairwell one day, he is greeted by a W.F. Gerald (Jeff Bridges), a garrulous and semi-alcoholic writer who offers faux-insightful comments on Thomas’ life. (Example: When Thomas says he’s had a bad day, W.F. asks in reply, “What’s her name?”)

One night, while out at a burlesque club with Mimi, Thomas spots his father at a table with a woman who’s not Judith. He starts stalking this woman, Johanna (Kate Beckinsale), and tells her he wants her to break off the affair with Ethan. She tells Thomas the real reason he’s pursuing her is that he wants to sleep with her. And, sure enough, he does.

That, alas, isn’t the most ridiculous plot twist that writer Allan Loeb (“Collateral Beauty”) tosses into this story of shallow people being mean to each other in the most pretentious language possible. It’s the sort of script where a viewer starts to think W.F. might be a figment of Thomas’ imagination, and soon discovers that’s more interesting than what actually happens.

Director Mark Webb has made brash young men his speciality — he made the too-cute-by-half romance “(500) Days of Summer” before showing Andrew Garfield as a self-satisfied superhero in two “Amazing Spider-Man” movies — but he outdoes himself here. Webb plants these insufferable characters into shiny settings for the suspiciously erudite, where even a wedding party’s drunken uncle (Bill Camp) drops pearls of sardonic wisdom.

“The Only Living Boy in New York” is also the sort of movie where the soundtrack choices induce severe eye-rolling. I suspect Beckinsale’s character is named Johanna solely so Webb could play Bob Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna” in reference to her. Then there’s the song that gives the movie its title; any director who thinks a story about a college-age intellectual sleeping with a much older woman needs Simon and Garfunkel songs should go back to film school and watch “The Graduate” a few dozen times.