Harmless as it is, and this is a movie that redefines the notion of harmless, “Flakes” poses a bit of a dilemma. The dilemma is not artistic. Director Michael Lehmann, who used to compel a lot more interest when he made acidic black comedies like “Heathers,” rises to the non-existent challenge of realizing a cutesy screenplay that might have better served a special three-part episode of “My Name Is Earl.”

Mr. Lehmann has assembled a very talented cast, including the always watchable Zooey Deschanel and the sleepy-eyed Aaron Stanford, who play mutually adoring yet deeply aggravated young lovers living the boho life in New Orleans. Mr. Stanford is Neal, a scruffy rock guitarist whose musical ambitions have suffered for his obsessive devotion to his day job: managing a café that serves vintage breakfast cereals. It’s called Flakes, of course, and harbors a motley cross section of humanity that drifts through the Faubourg Marigny district. That’s the neighborhood, adjacent to the French Quarter, where Tennessee Williams set Stella Kowalski’s apartment in “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

These few blocks have, as ever, fostered nonconformity, and “Flakes” clings to the ideal of New Orleans as a happy magnet for wacky slackers from across the country, a place where it’s seemingly easy to drop out, get a service job, and do your crazy art thing. That’s where Ms. Deschanel comes in. As a T-shirt designer named Miss Pussy Katz — not to be confused with a real-life New Orleans puppeteer named Miss Pussycat, I presume — she dreams of being an “art legend” and living with her boyfriend Neal in an Airstream trailer, hauled by an El Dorado convertible.

Unfortunately, Neal has lost sight of this, as well as that new album he’s supposed to be recording, because he’d rather debate the finer points of chocolate-coated monster cereals with jobless stoners. And keep an eye on the café’s owner, a raggedy acid casualty played by Christopher Lloyd. It’s a role he can do in his sleep (go back and watch “Taxi”), which is probably why he spends the movie in pajamas.

As comic fodder, “Flakes” is lightweight but amusing. Crisis strikes when a young MBA type arrives to coin the Flakes concept as a Starbucks-style franchise, and sets up shop across the street. The satirical take on corporate leaching of indie funk hit its apogee with Terry Gilliam’s 2001 film “Ghost World,” so the humor is a tad soggy. And while Mr. Lehmann teases out elements of New Orleans’s eccentricity and local color, it’s extraordinarily difficult to overlook the Katrina factor — there’s no mention of it. Other than a brief gag about busloads of homeless people arriving to sabotage the rival café’s grand opening, the film exists in a neverland of New Orleans as it was before the 2005 disaster. It’s impossible to indulge the script’s young-artists-in-love trivialities against a real-life backdrop as tragic as what the city has become, even if the French Quarter and its immediate surroundings remain an oasis for tourists and bartenders.

“Flakes” means to be quirky. Instead, it’s stale.