Big, scruffy Bouli Lanners wrote, directed and starred as Yvan in “Eldorado” and did an admirable job at all three.

You’d sigh in relief if his character Yvan pulled over to help you if you were broken down off the road — even in a big, pale blue Chevy station wagon, as he does in “Eldorado.” Yvan, who sells such vehicles to clunk collectors, has agreed to drive a thief he found hiding under his bed with a can of coins, Elie (played by Fabrice Adde and the only other character to get a name) to Elie’s parents’ home. Elie’s the kind of scruffy, scrawny mumblemouth who would be great to front the next Strokes reincarnation and big-hearted Yvan figures a good way to waste a day or two is to try to get a shoegazing wastoid off skag.

“Eldorado” seems pieced together from moments seared into its writer’s soul that seem too writerly not to include. Writers say “kill your darlings” — the written equivalent of too-precious couples who call each other “shmoopy.” The adorable chubby-cheeked toddlers of prose. Little moments scratched down on a shirt-pad notebook or the back of a receipt during flushes of creative inspiration.

These might have been Lanners’: A homeless man who tells an off-camera interviewer that he’s Christ the Messiah, but that he hasn’t returned to be crucified again. A man who stops his RV to assist travelers — and he’s nude! An old man with a huge garage full of preserved old cars, each dented because they each ran into some careless pedestrian, and the old man who has visions about your future when he’s had a jigger of vodka and holds your hand. Two car racers belong a sky-high bridge, where suddenly, someone throws a Doberman from the bridge to thud, inhumanely, on the station wagon’s ceiling.

Stitched together, the frenetic design more resembles one of those spider webs constructed by spiders dosed with caffeine, or LSD or cocaine. It sort of looks interesting, but overall it’s as melancholy as a 7-11 shopper in pajamas. There are some cute glimmers of friendship between Elie and Yvan — Elie taping Yvan’s hair to the roof to keep him driving without nodding off, spending the night wrapped up in an abandoned trailer wearing garish, floral cushion covers for pajamas, their cold splash in a river the next day to bathe. Still, it’s not enough. Though it’s always on the move, the movie — a thankfully short 80 minutes — barely goes anywhere in the end.

Did we really need another movie to solely pound home William Burroughs’ “Never trust a junkie?” Haven’t we got anything more important to comment on, anything more original to contribute? Not that Belgium’s going to produce anything that will ever again surpass its great cultural high-water mark of Tintin comics, but blistering barnacles, why not try?

It’s no chore to watch the noble, yet duped Yvan. The landscapes are wonderfully depressing and beautiful at once, fog suffocating a forested Belgian road near the French border as the boat-like Carter throwback purrs inoffensively by. The soundtrack, strident surfer rock that doesn’t match, and the choleric Latin Devendra Banhart, seems a good mix tape. There are parts of “Eldorado” that are gold. But they’re not the ones that matter.

Ashley O’Dell reviews movies that aren’t in theaters anymore.