Starring Ashton Kutcher and Anne Heche. Rated 18A.

We all know Los Angeles is a land of hustlers. We know mostly because movies made there tell us that. From Sunset Boulevard to Shampoo and American Gigolo, the self-loathing lothario, trading on youthful appeal for help up the ladder, has been irresistible to Hollywood filmmakers—most of whom have been from somewhere else.

In Spread, El Lay is seen through the lens of Scots director David Mackenzie, who has a thing for troubled layabouts, as played by Jamie Bell and Ewan McGregor in Hallam Foe and Young Adam, respectively. Here, the beautiful lout is Ashton Kutcher’s Nikki, a trendy denizen of the nightclub underworld who specializes in latching onto wealthy, attractive older women for their credit cards and super-comfy digs. (Hence the suggestive title, more than amply reinforced by sex scenes that are much more, um, athletic than usual.)

Now, moving in with Anne Heche, who plays a powerful lawyer and weak judge of character, doesn’t exactly take us into Harold and Maude territory. Anyway, that would involve feelings, and Nikki doesn’t seem to have those—at least until he falls for an equally carnivorous operator (Russian-born Margarita Levieva, who played the much-coveted Lisa P in Adventureland). As always happens to hustlers, a hint of real intimacy proves our antihero’s downfall, and this moralizing makes the movie sag a bit, as well.

The slickly shot tale begins and ends with Nikki’s cynical inner thoughts, told in purposely flat voice-over, but that device is absent for the rest, and we don’t get a tangible sense of who he might be underneath the Axe-spray bravado. Kutcher has matured enough to at least suggest hidden depths, but we’re not quite sure what we’ve been left with when it’s over. Still, it sure was fun the night before.