In The Driftless Area, Zooey Deschanel plays a woman who may or may not be dead. Caught between worlds, she’s alluring and likable, but ultimately unable to provide any insights into why she’s there, something like the film itself. The Driftless Area is an intriguing film, a tale of crime and coincidences that floats along enjoyably with an ethereal tone, but doesn’t really cohere or adequately convey the ideas it grasps at.

In a terrific opening scene, Pierre (Anton Yelchin) is hitchhiking with a rose bush after his car breaks down. He’s inexplicably picked up by Shane (John Hwakes), a low-level criminal who’s just made off with around $70,000, and after Shane’s attempt to steal Pierre’s rosebush leads to a crash, Pierre makes off with the money out of spite instead of greed. Pierre and Shane have never met at that point, but the characters in the film are linked in a web of connections where past and future are relative terms. Shane is haunted by accidentally killing Stella (Deschanel) when he burned down a house he thought was empty. Yet Stella still sufficiently exists to have saved Pierre’s life. She rescued him from the bottom of a well and they later fall in love; the rosebush is a gift for her.

That money incites most of the plot, but not before Pierre’s best friend Carrie (Alia Shawkat) shows up to narrate Pierre’s life story. He’s an orphan who never quite fit in and is now working as a bartender. Dreamy and luckless, he breaks the first rule of movie protagonists by not really wanting anything, not even the money he takes from Shane, which he soon gives to a tragically scarred woman he encounters. Shane is keen to recover the money and he enlists the help of his more competent boss (Ciaran Hinds), who owns a rental car company along other criminal enterprises.

The film explores this plot in a pleasantly indirect way, leaving it mostly in the background as it allows Pierre and Stella time to explore the lush countryside and muse philosophically. In its idiosyncratic approach to a crime story, mixing neophytes with career criminals in the upper Midwest, The Driftless Area sometimes feels like Fargo with a gentler tone and less venal characters, though the metaphysical aspects make that comparison moot by the ending. But like a Coen Brothers film, The Driftless Area is not solely defined by its plot; it’s very enjoyable on a scene-by-scene basis because of surprising moments, humor, and good performances. However, unlike Fargo’s fantastic ending, The Driftless Area’s ending feels insubstantial and fails to resolve the larger ideas at play. The Driftless Area carries many of the hallmarks of a book adaptation that’s lost something in translation, notably an over-reliance on narration in the first act and several characters that seem important to the plot but remain undeveloped (Frank Langella’s possibly magical character is intended to be mysterious, but is mostly just confusing). There are worse things in life than interesting failures and hopefully debut writer-director Zachary Sluser gets another opportunity to deliver on the promising elements of The Driftless Area.