‘Memphis,” a student-y collage of broken images and chilling soundscapes, stars musician Willis Earl Beal, a Tom Waits knockoff who brings to mind a pretentious art-school kid more interested in expounding on the Nature of Art than in creating.

Essentially a disguised promotional video for Beal, the movie features its subject gliding and posing around the woebegone town, wearing sunglasses at night and climbing a tree.

Only intermittently does the film treat us to more than snippets of Beal’s woozy, misshapen folk-blues, but perhaps these are best taken in small doses anyway.

The film is not without its ragged beauty as it contemplates the cracked forlornness of Memphis, Tenn.

Yet the straining for authenticity (as when a camera just happens to be sitting inside a car window that gets broken) becomes tiresome. And the airy Beal seems as organic to this bruised landscape as a tour bus full of French and German tourists cruising across 125th Street.