With “Be Kind Rewind,” the digital-age magician Michel Gondry delivers a handmade valentine to the communal self-entertainment of the YouTube age. The innovative French filmmaker’s yarn about two guys from Jersey who reshoot Hollywood blockbusters amounts to a family movie, a genial fable about creativity, community, and serendipity. Lacking the neurotic bite of Mr. Gondry’s “The Science of Sleep,” or the pathos of his “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “Be Kind Rewind” is loose at times to the point of being slack, but that breeziness and its amiably put-upon heart are part of its charm.

This film certainly requires some kindness as it moseys along for nearly 30 minutes just to set its pitch-meeting premise in motion. Mike (Mos Def) works at the titular Passaic video store, one of the very last to live up to its name, which is stocked with tapes and occupies the corner of a faded block of buildings targeted for redevelopment. The place has the lazy, musty air of a general store, and Mike’s garrulous friend Jerry (Jack Black), who lives in a nearby camper, is the type of small-town character who’s always shuffling in with unsolicited advice and diatribes.

The problems arise in a manner reminiscent of the ’80s movies that populate the store’s racks. While Mike’s boss, Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover as an ineffectual oldster), is away on a trip, Jerry drags Mike to investigate the nearby power plant, his primary tinfoil-hat obsession. Cue a Tesla-bolt-filled mishap straight out of “Weird Science.” When Jerry next visits the store, the magnetically charged butterball, who causes even our movie’s image to jitter, inadvertently erases the store’s inventory as surely as Jim Carrey’s breakup traumas were scrubbed clean in “Eternal Sunshine.”

Jerry proposes the Chaplinesque solution, at once hopeless and winning, of re-taping their own versions of the multimillion-dollar movies. The first attempt, “Ghostbusters,” is partly restaged in a local library (fans know why), with tinsel bent around stiff wire standing in for ray guns. As if you had to guess, Jerry and Mike’s “Ghostbusters” becomes a word-of-mouth hit among customers, who line up around the block to get their hands on it. Other movies that are “sweded,” as the process is called, include “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Driving Miss Daisy,” “Robocop,” and “Boyz ‘n the Hood,” with key catchphrases intact and Jerry and Mike sporting wigs or stuffed into junk suits. The comedy comes off as more likeably broad than hipsterish or truly madcap, mating the old “15-Minute Hamlet” gag to Mr. Gondry’s music-video skills of reinterpretation in lo-fi mode. (A montage segueing through multiple send-ups, as if on one continuous set, could have been lifted from the director’s back catalog.) Mr. Black is an obvious match to this material, having made his bones as a schlubbish sight gag of a performer, and he mercifully curtails his showboating (babble-singing is kept to a bare minimum).

Mos Def plays the beleaguered, mild-mannered straight man, and the two are joined by a game recruit (rubber-faced Melonie Diaz, acting gal-off-the-streetish) from a dry-cleaning store. Mr. Gondry goes for an improvisatory feel that is decidedly post-“Dave Chappelle’s Block Party,” his live Brooklyn concert film with the comedian. Scenes, especially those with Ms. Diaz, feel refreshingly unvarnished and sometimes have the line-running casualness of an outtake reel.

The obvious next step in the story would be for the craze to go national, in the subgenre of mass-media cautionary capers formalized in the ’50s with the likes of “It Could Happen to You” or “A Face in the Crowd.” But, even if the movie’s sense of locale never feels too deep, “Be Kind” is committed to its redone home entertainment remaining hometown entertainment. And Mr. Gondry encourages a folk-myth echo in the organic way these innovations spring up: The term “swede” arises out of a malapropism; Jerry and Mike make up rental rules on the fly, and the locals (cheered by Mia Farrow as a flaky, suspicious housewife) prove fiercely loyal to their knock-off art born of the mainstream.

Mr. Fletcher turns out to have been spying on a video chain store, scrutinizing its competitive techniques, and the populism of “Be Kind” is a bit more radical than many community-action movies. The gray-haired nostalgist hails jazz pianist Fats Waller as a Passaic-born hero, but when his documentation proves wanting, the movie runs with the idea that there is a freedom to making up one’s own history. It comes off as a throwaway twist, but the faint hint of satire is more than half-baked, suggesting the right to rework a common cultural heritage (albeit one that prizes green ghosts and buddy movies).

“Be Kind Rewind” presses on to a Capra-esque finale, a pull-up-a-chair screening at the store that spills into the streets. Filmmakers who started in music videos often remain prisoners of their three-minute devices, and Mr. Gondry’s kid-engineer approach makes it hard to forget where he came from. But if one scales down expectations that “Be Kind” squeeze ever-more-clever comedy from its premise, the spectacle of Mr. Gondry and his cast taking it easy makes for an agreeable enough lark.