Starring Jí´ Odagiri and Tomokazu Miura. In Japanese with English subtitles. Unrated. Opens Friday, May 22, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

The Jim Jarmusch–like title tells you something about this whimsical tour of Japan’s biggest city and about those who inhabit its odder corners. But it neither quite conveys the unique charm of this cockeyed character study nor the subtle emotional punch it packs in the end.

This wonderfully satisfying tale begins with slacker college student Fumiya (Jí´ Odagiri) in his eighth year of school and deeply in debt. That last part is driven home when hired thug Fukuhara (Tomokazu Miura) tells him to cough up about 10 grand (Canadian), or else! The next day, he again runs into the hood, who offers to pay off Fumiya’s debt, with extras, if the kid will spend an undetermined amount of time wandering around the city with him.

Turns out Fukuhara may have committed some extracurricular crime—we only have his word for it—and now he’s less on the run than out for a stroll to visit obscure areas he went with his wife, as glimpsed in mysterious flashbacks. As Fumiya is forever explaining, the sad-eyed younger fellow was abandoned as a child and has few such memories to offer.

In any case, they make an amusing pair—a mullet-haired old-timer and a chain-smoking post-adolescent with a wild Hendrix ’do aimlessly traipsing around the less-photogenic quarters of Tokyo, which constitutes a highly active third character here. Others along the way include a daft painter, some troubled shopkeepers, and a woman who pretends that Fukuhara is her long-lost husband. But is she pretending?

In the whacked-out yet gently grounded vision of Satoshi Miki, working from a novel by Yoshinaga Fujita, the big city, like its people, is capable of providing all the love, loss, and human comedy that one big-haired boy can possibly need.