Dan (Jude Law) is a writer of obituaries and negligible novels. Alice (Natalie Portman) is a former stripper turned professional gamine. Anna (Julia Roberts) is a maker of shallow but luxurious photographs. Larry (Clive Owen) is a horny dermatologist. “Closer” observes the tawdry circuit of coupling, uncoupling, and recoupling between these four over the course of several years, as they lie, whine, cheat, plead, and stab one another in the back.

Cynical and superficial, the movie imagines itself an inquiry into the sexual mores of a cynical and superficial age. Dan meets Alice on a crowded London street so dazed by their glamour that it moves in slow motion. Jaywalking New Yorker (and cultural ignoramus) that she is, Alice steps the wrong way into traffic and gets bonked by a taxi. Dan takes her to the hospital. Cue clever banter.

Jump forward in time, and Dan is being photographed by Anna for the dust jacket of a novel he has written based on the life of Alice, now his girlfriend. Cue more clever banter, climaxing in Dan’s attempt to smooch the leggy shutterbug.

Later that night, Dan pretends to be a busty blonde slut named Anna in an Internet chat room. On the other end is Doctor Larry, who begins to diddle beneath his lab coat. Clever cyber banter ensues, as Dan dupes Doc into meeting “Anna” at the London Aquarium. The next day he does so, and en counters the real Anna staring at a tank full of bad symbolism – I mean sharks. Larry and Anna engage in clever banter.

Jump forward in time, and Larry and Anna are a clever couple saying clever things at the opening of Anna’s show of clever new photographs. Dan and Alice show up and immediately begin to flirt, cleverly, with their hosts.

Jump forward in time again, and Anna has left Larry for Dan. Jump again to Larry ogling Alice in a strip club. Then to Anna cheating on Dan with Larry, then to Dan dumping Anna for Alice, then to Alice dumping Dan, Larry being nasty, and so one. The moral of the story is that people are desperate, cowardly, and mean. Throughout, you will be treated to fabulously inspired, tremendously delivered, impossibly clever banter.

All this leaping about might strike some as a bold use of ellipses, with months and years passing in a single cut or fade. In the theater these are called acts, and no one is startled to realize that all kinds of things might happen between them – things that will be filled in by banter, often quite clever.

I suspect it is also in the theater – the smuggest kind of theater – that one most often encounters the monstrously clever types who populate “Closer.” I’ve never met such linguistic acrobats in real life – and I’ve chatted up some fierce drag queens in my time. Quick-witted motormouths are certainly no strangers to movies, but rarely does one find such lethal verbal parries, such amazing bon mots, such perfectly formed rebuttals tossed so effortlessly off the lips, such bogus mannerism of rhythm.

These people aren’t talking, they’re playing verbal ping-pong, a game based on the batting around of empty objects. The only thing “Closer” gets close to is the spectacle of four huge movie stars gobbling down a writer’s phony baloney and regurgitating it onscreen with gusto. This material began as a play – eureka! – written by Patrick Marber, who has now authored the screenplay for a movie directed by Mike Nichols.

Like Mr. Nichols’s recent “Wit” and “Angels in America,” “Closer” isn’t a film at all but an opportunity for celebrities to work their gums on a text warmed over from the stage. This isn’t altogether something to sneeze at: Though it makes for mediocre movies, it succeeds in transmitting certain powerful energies from the original medium – the way a photograph of a painting may indicate an idea of form but no real sense of texture.

Emma Thompson was splendid in “Wit,” undeniably moving in the role of a dying professor grappling with abstractions from her hospital bed. Ditto the vast cast of “Angels in America,” who gave voice to Tony Kushner’s volcanic outrage and shattering compassion. And with the exception of Ms. Portman, whose most admirable talent here is her credibility in a G-string, the actors in “Closer” do very nice work, too.

But in all three films, the acting detaches itself from the entire complex of light, motion, sound – things that exists on any frame of film. Movie stars have been freed to declaim, to showboat, to turn a phrase and “command the room.” There’s not one strong image in all this Nicholized theater, not a moment that couldn’t be better done by real people performing in real time in a real room. There are, however, numberless bits that would make Jon Lovitz bug out and declare “Acting! Genius! Thank you!”

Eisenstein, Cocteau, and Welles adored the theater, and they gathered its energies to transform cinema. “Brechtian” filmmakers like Fassbinder, Oliveira, and Straub-Huillet fuse the artifice of theater to the very grain of their movies. Mr. Nichols, in his recent film, stumbles inadvertently over distancing effects. “Closer” is a bad movie – and a false one – in part because of Mr. Marber’s insincere writing. But its director was also content to repackage work from another medium rather than reimagine it in the terms of his own.