The story of a "garage band," desperately trying to make the big-time, is the subject of sometimes visionary director Alex Proyas' new Australian comedy Garage Days. From the master visual stylist who brought us The Crow and Dark City, two purely aesthetic experiences with little or nothing in the way of character, Garage Days is a bit of a departure. And though the film deals intimately with its interpersonal relationships at the expense of its backstage story, it comes up exceedingly short in offering any interesting characters, original situations or sympathetic insights.

The story focuses on the personal and professional trials of a down-on-their-luck Sydney garage band. Lead singer Freddy (Kick Gurry) moonlights by day in a local record store. After a disastrous first gig that gets them nowhere, he and the other band members - prickly bassist Tanya (Pia Miranda), sex and drugs drummer Lucy (Chris Sandrinna), morose guitarist Joe (Brett Stiller) and off-the-wall manager Bruno (Russell Dykstra) - set their sights on getting signed by an oily record producer (Marton Csokas). All of this is diffused by a love story that's pretty pedestrian and routine, with Freddy courting Joe's estranged, pregnant girlfriend, Kate (Maya Stange).

Films like this almost always work - would-be musicians living at extremes and trying to get a break. But the problem with Garage Days is that it suffers from a fatal identity crisis. For a film about a rising band, there's virtually no live music in the entire film, with Proyas instead opting to pepper his soundtrack with recognizable, standard-issue rock-n-roll tunes. The result is that we never for a minute believe these people are musicians, and though they initially state that they're passionate about "making it," there's no trace that they're passionate about making music itself.

Where's the raging rock-n-roll energy of a Sid & Nancy? Where's the lyrical melancholy of an Almost Famous? Where's the doped-up grandeur of a Velvet Goldmine? Hell, even The Commitments offered more grit than what's on display here.

We never see any evolution of the band, any connection to the music, any passion in the performance. The overriding problem in Garage Days is that there's nothing here that would indicate the band knows how to play music or has much more than a generic drive for success. We don't actually hear them play until the end of the film, and to the film's credit, they're self-aware at their own awfulness. The band itself serves only as an arbitrary backdrop for the watered-down, two-dimensional romantic triangle.

But the love triangle per se is not the problem. What sinks the film is that Proyas and co-writers David Warner and Michael Udesky, offer little of interest beyond the generic and obvious fundamentals of such a dilemma. There's no originality or heart here, it's all by the numbers and the characters never come to life. In other words, it's just a shallow trip.

Sprinkled throughout the film are a series of unfunny, broad and slapsticky scenes that are assaultively confident in their ineptitude. Among them: a record producer receiving oral sex from beneath a table while carrying on a side conversation; a sex scene between two band members involving corny S&M; the "death" of a melon substituting for a baby (this one has to be seen to be believed); the destruction of a dozen slot machines.

It's a surface job for its duration, but that doesn't stop Proyas from offering up one of those last-ditch, late in the film, nostalgic video montages of past moments, assembled for Freddy's enjoyment. Watching these scenes, instead of feeling any warmth, we're only reminded just how ordinary and unmemorable a film this has been.

On a technical level, Proyas no longer needs to prove himself capable of creating arresting images. However, Garage Days seems to have taken its cue from the Guy Ritchie school of aggressive, cocky, in-your-face attitude, substituting for real human behavior. To be fair, there are moments in the film that struggle for something more - as Joe descends into drugs and melancholy, and Kate contemplates the future of her baby and relationships. But only during a Trainspotting-like, drug-induced hallucinatory sequence does Proyas almost make things work.

The actors are serviceable, though lead Kick Gurry doesn't strike me as the charismatic lead singer or rock-n-roll type, and appears a bit long-in-the-tooth to be a fledgling young rocker with big dreams. In close-ups, he appears more tired and on the down slope. However, the one bright spot in the cast, Chris Sandrinna as oversexed and drugged drummer Lucy, displays considerable wattage and energy. If Proyas had cast him in the lead, maybe we would have had something.