A romantic comedy that plays like a spoofy version of a glossy magazine trend story, “Everything’s Gone Green” finds its vibe somewhere between the bubbly Scottish village capers of vintage Bill Forsythe and the slacker absurdity of that early Fox sitcom “Get a Life.”

You remember “Get a Life,” right? Former David Letterman sidekick Chris Elliot starred as a 30-something paperboy who rode his bicycle everywhere and was wholly dependent on his family while engineering all manner of wacky antics. R.E.M., heavy into its lightweight “Shiny Happy People” phase, supplied the dopiest of dopey theme songs: “Stand.”

The music compiled for “Everything’s Gone Green” is much, much better: a hip jukebox of contemporary Canadian pop acts whose gimlet-eyed observances of everyday life make an ideal analog for the perspective of Ryan, a 20-something guy who rides his bicycle everywhere and, having been evicted by his girlfriend and walked out on his aimless cubicle job, is wholly dependent on his family — for a moment, anyway.

Ryan is played by curly-headed Paulo Costanzo (good, but otherwise inexplicable as Drea de Matteo’s son on the ill-fated “Friends” spin-off “Joey”), an actor whose perpetual smirk seems a perfect response to the ephemeral world around him. Vancouver, B.C., that is, a polyglot megapolis that notoriously has its vibrant multicultural image whitewashed for endless American movie and TV productions that transform its locales into Manhattan or backwater Texas. Hometown to “Generation X” author Douglas Coupland, the city inspired him to write “Green,” his first screenplay that didn’t begin life as one of his trendoid books.

If Mr. Coupland’s social studies ever struck you as glib or airpuffed, such attitude translates surprisingly well to the screen. Director Paul Fox does a handy job of showcasing Vancouver’s wealth of locations and vistas as a running in-joke, using the backdrop to underscore a theme about the diminishing value of reality in the hypermodern world.

Of course, guys like Ryan have a running start. Thanks to a fluke, he gets a gig interviewing winners of the state lottery, taking photographs with a cheap digital camera that come out looking like William Eggleston’s. He mounts the Whitney Biennial-worthy blowups on the walls of the loft he now occupies for free in the empty high-rise apartments developed by his real-estate mogul brother, who has gotten tangled up in some crossfire with the Chinese government over the property sale. His friends are rapidly turning to organic marijuana growing as a source of income — when they’re not appearing in live feeds from cybersex Web sites.

Meanwhile, Ryan is falling for Ming (Steph Song), a beautiful young woman of Chinese extraction who would seem to be the one “real” quantity on the horizon. Ming’s occupation, naturally, is creating all those movie sets to look like anything but Vancouver — ooh, irony! — and she’s involved with a churlish scam artist (J.R. Bourne) whose chief enterprise is laundering investment funds for the Yakuza. Mr. Bourne, who plays broad and bravely so, crops up as a kind of Gordon Gekko of the Great White North. He schools Ryan in the shell game of moral relativism that the movie suggests is an unavoidable symptom of the times.

Nothing in this comedy’s narrative arc ever succeeds in wiping the smirk off Ryan’s face, much as the arched eyebrow inflections of Mr. Coupland’s screenplay never deflate. Beneath its extensive trappings, the movie still comes down to the old “meet-cute” premise of a hundred screwball comedies: How does boy get girl? Ms. Song, a popular comedienne on Singapore television and co-star in the forthcoming Jet Li thriller “Rogue,” brings an appealing gravity to her performance that offers a single escape hatch from the film’s nonstop pixilation.

It’s a no-brainer that our slacker hero would want to jump in headfirst, even if he has to go back to riding a bicycle.