Near beginning of “Charlie,” which opens today at the Pioneer Two Boots Theater, the title character, a Staten Island mechanic played by D.J. Mendel, experiences the decidedly unromantic, nonmusical reality behind the venerable R&B standard, “Silhouettes.” A “dim light casts two silhouettes on the shade,” all right, but unfortunately for Charlie, nobody is singing. Unlike the guy in the song, Charlie is on the right block and looking up from his very own driveway at the shadow of his wife in the arms of another man.

Mr. Mendel plays Charlie as a steely-eyed coiled spring of a man, and both actor and character appear open to any impulse — especially if it’s a violent one. During the marital confrontation that follows his driveway discovery, Charlie bounces his wife, Anna (Denise Greber), off the refrigerator and onto the floor, unsuccessfully tries to squeeze an apology out of her with both hands on her throat, and initiates sex before Anna’s grudging surrender kills the mood.

Cast out of his own home, Charlie spends the bulk of the film halfheartedly looking for his rival in bars and back alleys and treating his emotional wounds with booze and cigarettes, while wholeheartedly searching for himself in the eyes of a mistress, an ex-girlfriend, a daughter, his best friend, and other lost souls he encounters in the night. His is a twilight world of happy hours, diner breakfast specials, cheap motels, and the happier memories that his mind conjures up to fill the empty, sad, and angry present. “I’m trying to put it all together in my head,” Charlie snarls at one point. Eventually, his desire for revenge succumbs to the realization that as victimized as he initially believes himself to be, in all of his close brushes with love and near misses at genuine intimacy, Charlie has always been his own worst enemy.

Though the event that kickstarts the film hearkens back to American music from the ’50s, “Charlie” is clearly a cinematic child of American film from the 1970s. Photographed primarily in handheld close-ups staged in locations that appear to have been decorated as much by real life as by an art department, the film’s brooding pauses, halting dialogue, and totally committed acting bears a strong whiff of John Cassavetes’s revered low-budget performance-driven pictures.

Director Salvatore Interlandi also takes a page from the Cassavetes stylebook by permitting his cast to leave Till Neumann’s script when needed in order to engage one another. In scene after scene, the actors gamely work their way down a list of awkward improvisatory excesses, such as elliptically repeating each other’s declamatory statements as questions, indulging in sarcastic applause, and energetically interrupting one another in pursuit of some kind of true life rhythm.

Though Mr. Mendel and his comrades give their all (Mr. Mendel shares particularly good chemistry with Tim Donovan Jr. as a co-worker named Tommy), “Charlie” is less a nuanced journey to self-knowledge than a series of confrontations pitched with an overwrought, macho emotionalism so unrelenting that at times it feels as melodramatic as a Lifetime movie, only a lot more masculine. Despite all the overturned bookshelves, bruised jaws, scared girls, and smashed furniture that Charlie eventually follows back home like breadcrumbs, his path to the small glimmer of enlightenment he attains is an inherently passive, interior pursuit. It’s not so much touchy-feely as grabby-punchy.

Though “Charlie” bends under the weight of false histrionic notes and the ill-effects of hitching Mr. Mendel’s three-dimensional performance to a two-dimensional character and story, Mr. Interlandi’s fleeting look into one man’s wintery personal limbo is nevertheless a vivid one. The only thing separating middle-aged angst from adolescent rage, the film suggests, is time. Life has offered Charlie the opportunity to repeat the same personal mistakes an infinite number of times. The wisdom pulled from learning that hard lesson doesn’t appear to bring much comfort.

Through October 3 (155 E. 3rd St., between avenues A and B, 212-591-0434).