COFFEE AND CIGARETTES

[] (three stars)

Smokin’. Running time: 96 minutes. Rated PG-13 (language). At Loews Lincoln Square, Broadway and 68th Street; and Sunshine Cinema, Houston Street, bet. First and Second avenues.

—–

AS “Coffee and Cigarettes,” Jim Jarmusch’s dreamy medley of off-kilter duets, unfurls, there’s plenty of time to muse upon the unusual planes of Meg White’s face or the nature of something called “acoustical resonance.”

Indie hipster Jarmusch’s distinctive brand of effortless cool and quirky humor percolate through each of 11 vignettes, all shot fairly statically in crisp, aesthetically pleasing black and white.

Jarmusch filmed the first, appropriately jittery, sketch – which stars a youthful Roberto Benigni and comedian Steven Wright goofing over espresso and smokes – in 1986 as a short for “Saturday Night Live.”

Over the years, he corralled more shorts featuring inspired match-ups of actors and musicians he’d worked with on movies such as “Down by Law” and “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai” – and his admiration for the likes of Bill Murray, Tom Waits, Iggy Pop, the Wu-Tang Clan, Steve Buscemi and the White Stripes is clear.

In each, two or three people meet up in a coffee shop or a dilapidated dive bar and, over the twin addictions of the title, riff loopily about this and that, with a number of benign themes popping up irregularly.

Kudos to Jarmusch for always having the pluck to break with conventional narrative, although the quality of the collection here is maddeningly uneven.

A couple of the sketches in the middle drag lifelessly, but the best ones – usually revolving around a sharp satire of celebrity – buoy the whole.

A hilarious sketch in which Alfred Molina and the excellent British comic Steve Coogan draft an almost incidental indictment of Hollywood relationships is just sublime, and Cate Blanchett’s dual role as a glamorous movie star and her resentful Aussie cousin is nothing short of dazzling.

The film winds down with a wistful little vignette starring New York underground icons Taylor Mead and Bill Rice listening to the strains of Mahler and pretending their takeout java is champagne.

There’s real emotion in the final piece, a telltale sign that Jarmusch’s high-concept, visually stylized creation is something more than the sum of its parts.