It takes a brave movie to open with a voice-over clarifying “the difference between a failure and a fiasco.” As Drew Baylor explains at the beginning of “Elizabethtown,” any fool can achieve failure; it takes a special genius to create a fiasco. The distinction is of interest to Drew, a clever young sneaker-designer at a company mischievously patterned after Nike, because the shoe he has spent eight years designing, the “Spasmotica,” turns out to be so unpopular that it loses the company $972 million. That, needless to say, is a fiasco.

“Elizabethtown,” by contrast, is merely a failure, neither grand nor memorable enough to ascend to the upper echelons of incompetence. The sixth film by writer-director Cameron Crowe, “Elizabethtown” is also his most disappointing, a clumsy pastiche of quirky characters and improbable circumstances held together by little more than its classic-rock soundtrack. Considering the last movie he made was 2001’s “Vanilla Sky,” a radically ill-conceived remake of the Spanish head trip “Abre los ojos,” there is ample reason to be concerned about Mr. Crowe’s future.

But first back to young Drew, played by Brit-of-the-moment Orlando Bloom. After being fired by his boss (Alec Baldwin, in the “isn’t it funny that a former star is now a character actor” role for which he has lately become known), Drew decides to kill himself by strapping an upscale kitchen knife to his exercise machine and hopping aboard. Before he can complete this yuppie seppuku, however, the phone rings: His father has died of a heart attack while visiting family in Kentucky. Drew’s overwhelmed mother and sister need him to fly out from the West Coast to recover the body.

On the empty red-eye to Louisville, Drew meets Claire (Kirsten Dunst), a cute but pushy flight attendant who takes great pains to ensure that he knows the proper pronunciation of the city (Loo-uh-vull) and the best way to drive from there to tiny Elizabethtown, where his father passed away. Once he arrives in the titular hamlet, Drew has the expected encounters with regionally comical relatives and begins a fitful romance with Claire, a free spirit prone to saying thing like “I’m impossible to forget but hard to remember.”

There are a few side plots, but none are accorded more than a few minutes of screen time. Even Susan Sarandon, who plays Drew’s mom, makes only a fleeting appearance in the film, arriving at her husband’s memorial service just in time to offer a eulogy that is half comedy routine, half tap-dance recital. (Yes, it is exactly as painful as it sounds.)

For most of its 123 minutes, “Elizabethtown” belongs to its young leads, which is not an especially good thing. Mr. Bloom is as bland and remote as he was in “Kingdom of Heaven,” suggesting once again that he may be best suited to playing the straight man to flaky pirates and crotchety dwarves. Worse, in his effort to mimic an American accent, he appears to have swallowed his voice altogether. Ms. Dunst supplies the wit and energy their relationship is otherwise lacking. But her performance, like her character, is a scattered, frivolous one, too insubstantial to tether the film.

The real culprit, however, is Mr. Crowe, who never supplies the couple with anything approximating genuine dialogue or authentic emotion. Even the “buy in” scene, the moment when Drew and Claire fall for each other and we are meant to fall for their falling, is inert. The two spend an entire night talking on the phone, but Mr. Crowe does not allow them the luxury of conversation, instead presenting a staccato exchange of fragmentary aphorisms: “I’ve decided everything is black and white”; “Do you ever just think ‘I’m fooling everyone?'”; “Men see everything in a box, women see everything in a round room”; “I think I’ve been asleep most of my life.” The scene is “Elizabethtown” in miniature: A litany of arbitrary set pieces – the locals who silently direct Drew into town, Claire’s declaration of love at the podium of an empty reception hall – held together by an only rudimentary stab at a plot.

In place of that narrative connective tissue, Mr. Crowe offers enough music to crash an i-Pod. A writer for Rolling Stone when he was just a teenager, Mr. Crowe has always paid great attention to his movies’ soundtracks. Many of the best moments in his earlier films depended on his precise pairings of scene and song – John Cusack’s boombox serenade of “In Your Eyes” in “Say Anything,” Patrick Fugit’s worried dash through New York to “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters” in “Almost Famous.” But in “Elizabethtown” Mr. Crowe’s musical selections seem intended to replace the storyline rather than supplement it. Scene after scene feels as though it was put in the film specifically to accommodate a particular piece of music – a little Elton John here, a smattering of Tom Petty there.

At the end of the movie, as Drew prepares to drive home from Kentucky, Claire gives him a personalized map and accompanying soundtrack, 42 hours of hand-picked melodies specifically calibrated to the various sights and feelings he will experience along the way. It’s an ironic coda to a film that itself amounts to little more than a session of emotional tourism set to rock music. Before seeing “Elizabethtown,” I couldn’t have imagined what it would be like to listen to a 42-hour mix tape. Now, I fear, I have a pretty good idea.