Starring Javier Beltrán and Robert Pattinson. Opens Friday, June 26.

In the mid 1920s, three future powerhouses of modern Spanish culture happened to attend the same Madrid university. Little Ashes takes that historical fillip and runs with it—right off a cliff.

Remarkably, poet Federico Garcí­a Lorca (Javier Beltrán) and filmmaker Luis Buñuel (Matthew McNulty) were roomies when surrealist painter and lifelong phony Salvador Dalí­ (Robert Pattinson) arrived in his harlequin costume. Instead of being introduced to the unique milieu from which so much innovative art would spring, we get treated to two hours of thwarted lust—the product of sheer conjecture and sometimes laughably fervid imagination.

Director Paul Morrison is a veteran of British TV, but his approach to such rich material is strictly amateur hour. The script, from newcomer Philippa Goslett, has its ups and downs, but Morrison handles everything with the same hand-wringing excess. The premise here is that Garcí­a Lorca shed his heterosexual veneer—a bummer for his aristocratic fiancée (Marina Gatell)—as he became infatuated with the dandified Dalí­.

This horrified Buñuel, notoriously homophobic in real life and on-screen too—not that it stopped him from whisking the pre-mustache Dalí­ away to Paris, while Garcí­a Lorca remained in increasingly fascistic, priest-gripped Spain.

The film’s fixation on romantic anguish skips context but allows time for dreamy sequences that resemble perfume ads more than they do images of the Freudian subconscious—or anything else associated with the period.

The acting is tolerable, except for Pattinson; at times, the Twilight star seems to be playing the young Woody Harrelson. For some reason, though, the director had everyone speak English with thick Spanish accents, and decided to have Beltrán read Garcí­a Lorca’s poetry in the original Andalusian Spanish, with another actor translating in voice-over.

The effect throughout is of disembodied characters floating through a world of grotesque and relentlessly manipulated images, signifying nothing.