Adventures With ‘Sleepy’ N.Y. Slackers

Yoshifumi Hosoya’s “Sleepy Heads” is long on amiability but short on inspiration. In his feature writing and directing debut, Hosoya, best known as the cinematographer of “Combination Platter,” zeros in on three young Japanese men who’ve landed in New York, become liberated from the rigidity of society back home and wound up showing that Asians, once in the United States, can just as easily become slackers as countless others.

The trouble is that it’s tough to sustain involvement with guys who have likable personalities but for whom nothing much is happening, and who aren’t doing too much to make it happen.

Hiro (Eugene Nomura), the newest arrival, is a would-be singer-composer who doesn’t net much change from passersby as a guitar-strumming street performer. Ken (Toshiya Nagasawa) dreams of opening up his own Japanese-style fencing academy but winds up “guarding” a Japanese restaurant with his wooden sword. Akira (Takahiro “Engin” Fujita) is seriously into drugs. At 34 and after eight years in America, Ken is at least beginning to wonder if he isn’t frittering his life away--maybe the American Dream really will elude him after all.

Hosoya catches the guys up in a rather drawn-out adventure that’s only mildly humorous and that results in the film being no more than a minor item. Where he’s best is when he’s involving Hiro with a pretty young Japanese woman (Sayuri Higuchi Emerson) who’s fled a Tokyo office job only to wind up unhappily in a similar job at a Japan Airlines office. There, her pompous, upwardly mobile boss (Snakey Mao), having by coincidence gone to high school with Hiro, condescends mightily to him. There are also a couple of hilarious encounters with typically earnest Japanese tourists.

“Sleepy Heads” has an invitingly warm, nice feel to it and a charismatic cast, but there’s not much to it.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: some drug use, language.

‘Sleepy Heads’

Eugene Nomura: Hiro

Toshiya Nagasawa: Ken

Takahiro (Engin) Fujita: Akira

Sayuri Higuchi Emerson: Akiko

A Phaedra Cinema release of an Elephant Studio and Zazou Productions presentation. Director-cinematographer Yoshifumi Hosoya. Producers Yuko Yoshikawa, Shuji Okada and Hosoya. Screenplay by Hosoya, Nick Feyz, Christo Assefi and Edwin Baker. Editor Keiko Deguchi. Music Joshua Stone. Production designer Mark Helmuth. Primarily in Japanese with some English and English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 26 minutes.

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* Exclusively at the Monica 4-Plex, 1332 2nd St., Santa Monica, (310) 394-9741, and Town Center 4, Bristol at Anton, South Coast Plaza, Costa Mesa, (714) 751-4184.