Talk, as they say, is cheap, and in movies, that truth is literal. Dialogue-driven romantic comedy has become the genre of choice for many of New York’s budgetarily challenged native filmmakers. Cornball East Coast chauvinist wisdom suggests that America tilts sharply enough to the West that all the moneyed nuts roll into California. Locally grown independent romantic comedies like “Walking and Talking,” “Love Ludlow,” “Trust the Man,” “Broken English,” and now “Dedication,” which opens today, seem eager to prove that New York City is at an angle pitched to trap the serially commitmentphobic.

Let’s face it: The DNA of romantic comedies set in New York City is unalterable. As sure as a pigeon’s life cycle takes it from egg to first flight and eventually bombing position on a street lamp, the quirky but attractive leads in a film like “Dedication” must meet, loathe each other, succumb to circumstances forcing them together, give, take, love a little, blow it, reconcile, and then love a lot before the end credits roll. What is eye-opening about “Dedication” is how eager first-time writer David Bromberg and the actor Justin Theroux, here making his directorial debut, appear driven to shed their ostensible hero, Henry Roth (Billy Crudup), of anything that would make it possible to empathize with him.

Selfish, infantile, and socially dysfunctional, Henry is a children’s book author who cribs story ideas from porno films and prefers cocooning with heavy household objects on the floor of his movie-mandated enormous but unkempt NYC apartment to sharing intimacy with his girlfriends. The sole meaningful personal connection that Henry maintains is with his longtime illustrator Rudy (Tom Wilkinson), a shambling late-middle-aged wreck, willing collaborator, and good listener. Their profitable partnership and surrogate father/son chaste male romance ends suddenly with Rudy’s death.

Henry is devastated, but he has a book to finish and, under pressure from his publisher Arthur (Bob Balaban), he agrees to work with Lucy, an attractive and available young artist who, as played by Mandy Moore, is two-thirds heart and one-third hair. Locked up together in Arthur’s beach house, Henry and Lucy draw closer and a kind of love blossoms as the book fitfully takes shape. Inevitably, Henry messes up his good thing. Does he have it in him to do right by himself, Lucy, and those members of the audience that are able to emotionally invest in lonely and annoying Henry’s potentially less lonely and annoying future? What do you think?

Cookie-cutter American indie films are only too happy to play the magical realism card, so naturally Henry regularly commiserates with the ghost of Rudy, who in death, as in life, remains selflessly willing to attend to Henry’s cynical declarations about how much life sucks. Mr. Theroux stages Henry and Rudy’s chats, and much of the rest of “Dedication,” on eerily vacant New York exterior locations whose complete lack of background extras suggest that a casting call went unheeded or that the world within the film is coming to an end. Mr. Theroux’s compositional taste for wide-angle lenses, rigid frames, and tight close-ups shows promise, and his decision to score Henry’s scenes with the music of San Francisco trio Deerhoof is truly an inspired choice. Deerhoof’s unique and very potent synthesis of gushing melodic romanticism and grating musical cacophony achieves what the film itself does not.

Caustic, brooding, needy, spoiled, smug, and self-absorbed, Henry is the romantic comedy answer to 1940s cartoon genius Tex Avery’s nefarious creation Screwball Squirrel — a character so repellent that he challenged the reasons behind his movie’s existence. But American films of all budget levels have always hedged their bets by casting pretty people in ugly roles, and Henry is played by Mr. Crudup, a skilled actor blessed with prodigious masculine beauty. As in Bart Freundlich’s woeful “World Traveler,” Mr. Crudup’s stage-perfected acting chops and thinking-gal’s Ken doll looks take up a lot of the creative slack in “Dedication.” The nagging question of why any woman would have anything to do with Henry — the Chernobyl of toxic bachelors — is disingenuously addressed throughout the film by Mr. Crudup’s lantern-jawed smile and twinkling eye.

Independent filmmaking, as any film festival panel discussion participant will tell you, requires faith. Scriptwriters must have faith that their words will conjure up meaning and possibilities for producers. Producers must have faith that their director and actor attachments will appeal to financiers. Directors must have faith that what appealed to them about the script will still be there when the casting, rehearsing, shooting, and cutting ends. Actors must have faith that working for reduced fees on a no-frills shooting schedule will yield results and make the cold coffee and long hours worth while.

Based on the finished product here, it’s difficult to imagine what it was about the script that inspired the necessary faith for an intern to pass it upstairs. The creative Darwinism of American independent filmmaking is sometimes baffling. Unoriginal and uninteresting script properties suddenly become viable when cool people agree to participate. “Dedication” is blessed with Sundance-era credibility to spare on both sides of the camera. Unfortunately, nothing in “Dedication” distinguishes it from the rest of the inexhaustible crop of conceptually threadbare romantic comedies inexplicably praised by festival audiences and snapped up by distributors and cable networks in Utah, TriBeCa, and Toronto every year.