“GEMINI”

** 1/2

(R, 1:33)

Los Angeles, a city partly made and defined by movies, rarely comes off like a lived reality on screen. It’s a hazy dream, a fantasy, a noirish nightmare. It’s no wonder moviegoers feel they know it without visiting it, even if the Los Angeles they probably know is little more than the Hollywood sign, clogged freeways and bountiful blondes.

Filmmakers play with these banalities, which I imagine is why Aaron Katz opens “Gemini,” a pleasurably drifty, low-wattage mystery set in Los Angeles, with an upside-down shot of a palm tree. “Gemini” contains the expected freeways and a blonde on a billboard, as well as the kind of mystery that Hollywood dreams are made of, complete with a femme fatale, a detective and a lonely horn on the soundtrack. But as that upside-down palm tree suggests, he is coming at Los Angeles from his own angle.

This one opens at night. Jill (an appealing Lola Kirke), a personal assistant, is sitting in a parked car, her face lighted by a cellphone. Jill is waiting for Heather (Zoë Kravitz), a young star going through some kind of undefined rough patch. Heather has a meeting with a filmmaker, Greg (an amusingly acid Nelson Franklin), one of those jaundiced, permanently disappointed industry types.

“You’re going to kill me,” Heather tells Jill, using a variation on a murderous sentiment that’s tossed around a lot at the start of “Gemini.” Heather has decided that she doesn’t want to do Greg’s movie, and she wants Jill to break the bad news to him. Jill does. He does not take it well. Neither does Heather’s agent, who, perhaps jokingly, though also with a hint of malice, says that she wants to kill Heather, without whom there’s no movie.

The next day, Heather is dead, and Jill is a person of interest and soon on the run, having fled a detective (John Cho) who’s more suavely cinematic than professionally adept. She gives herself a quick makeover and enters a thickening mystery and meets a few suspects — the fine cast includes Greta Lee, James Ransone and Michelle Forbes — but Jill doesn’t so much chase down clues as stumble on them.

Katz, who also wrote and edited “Gemini,” is having a good time playing around with genre, but he isn’t much concerned with the techniques of the whodunit. The murder here isn’t interesting or especially mysterious (intentionally, it seems), and Jill’s sleuthing is often plain silly. What really interests Katz here are movies — the fingerprints of directors such as Robert Altman, David Lynch, Michael Mann and Sean Baker are all on “Gemini” — and how they have shaped Los Angeles, or at least our ideas about it.