Entertainment

Audiences would be better off ‘Somewhere’ else

Elle Fanning .

To compete with the quintessence of nullity that is Sofia Coppola’s insufferable “Somewhere,” imagine a film called “Wanna See Me Crack My Knuckles?” or possibly “Let’s Learn How Long It Takes This Shallow Dish of Liquid To Evaporate.” This isn’t an artistic effort, it’s a vacant lot whose signpost reads: “Space available. Movie can be made here. Or not. Whatever.”

“Somewhere” is about a visit to a small planet — planet Hollywood — as seen through the eyes of a bored and dissipated movie star, Johnny (Stephen Dorff), who lives by choice in the Sunset Strip celebrity ant farm the Chateau Marmont.

Johnny is galactically famous, the kind of star whose Italian hotel room comes with its own pool. This condition has left him wrecked. We feel his pain as he endures the lameness of the servant class — buzzing publicists, naked masseurs and chatty celebrity interviewers — and suffer knowingly as the world’s failure to be interesting causes mildly embarrassing situations. Johnny falls asleep during sex with one interchangeable blonde and gets his partner’s name wrong during a romp with another.

He churns through beer and strippers while shatteringly eventless scenes rip through three and five minutes of screen time, exploring such questions as “How many times will Johnny’s sports car go around this track?” (four) and “What kind of gelato will he order?” (all of them). Two further, unanswered questions hover in the air, or rather (since they’re never answered) settle in like dust: Who is sending him texts saying things like “Why are you such an a – – hole?” And how did he wind up with a cast on his arm?

Johnny has an adolescent daughter named Cleo (Elle Fanning), with whose mother he has little or no relationship. Johnny’s acquaintance with Cleo, too, is partial. After watching her ice skating, he asks when she took up this discipline. She’s been doing it for three years. When her mother tells him she needs to go away for a while, he is stuck actually fathering his child, and forced to take her on a film-promoting trip to Italy. This unexpected call to duty seems marginally to defrost his soul. The number of empty beer bottles in the vicinity decreases, and Johnny even takes up family-friendly activities such as playing Guitar Hero with his daughter.

Dorff and Fanning are both subtle and almost intriguing, and a film as elliptical as this one might be promising from a rookie. But this is Coppola’s fourth movie, and as she heads into her 40s, it’s clear that she has access to only one, thuddingly autobiographical, subject: Unripe celebrities with locked-in syndrome. Can’t the world feel how hard it is to be a little princess?

Everything Johnny has to say in the film could fit on one sheet of paper (and I’m not talking about a legal pad). It’s all of the purest banality. His sole moments of self-analysis come when he tells Cleo, “Sorry I haven’t been around,” but she doesn’t even hear him (over the fwomp of his awaiting helicopter), and when he tells an unidentified lady-friend on the phone, “I’m f – – king nothing. I’m not even a person.”

We know that. Are we supposed to feel sorry for a guy who has squandered his freedom for a cliche of alienation?

kyle.smith@nypost.com