In which Jim Jarmusch makes an excuse for a feature film out of a series of short vignettes featuring various hip people in mostly one-on-one conversations over some combination of caffeine and nicotine. As you’d expect, this anthology is a mixed bag. When it falls flat — as it does, unfortunately, in the opening scene featuring Roberto Benigni agreeing to see Steven Wright’s dentist — it’s a pain in the ass. But when it’s good, when Iggy Pop stammers his way through a sitdown with the very cool Tom Waits, or Cate Blanchett wholly inhabits two very different roles in the same tiny story, it’s hot.

Probably the best single segment — and doesn’t it figure that the funniest, most uncomfortable conversation in a slew of funny, uncomfortable conversations would seem to have the most to say about life in Hollywood — depicts a meeting between journeyman actor Alfred Molina and rising star Steve Coogan. Beautifully performed, especially by Coogan, it has to do with the quick decisions people make when they meet you about how much, if anything at all, they will have to do with you. By the time Coogan murmurs an exasperated obscenity at the end of the segment, he’s created a character both pitiable and detestable. But there are other, less describable pleasures in other segments: Bill Rice and Taylor Mead sit in a dark basement, on break from some damn job or other, sipping pisswater coffee and pretending it’s champagne; visiting Memphis, Joie Lee and Cinqué Lee get compared to Hekyll and Jekyll by clueless, meaning-no-harm waiter Steve Buscemi; Bill Murray knows his Wu-Tang Clan and really loves coffee. It’s the out-and-out weirdness that starts to get tiresome, like a Saturday Night Live skit left to run too long. What is the point of mounting a production of “Jack Shows Meg His Tesla Coil,” after all, except to have the opportunity to put that title card on the screen?

A running joke has to do with how crappy most of the coffee in the world really is, a throughline that will be appreciated by viewers who’ve spent too much time in questionable diners and truck stops. There are other cute connections between the different pieces. Lines of dialogue are spoken in one segment only to be explicitly echoed in another, and a cell phone call from a famous “Spike” follows the appearance of Lee siblings Joie and Cinqué early on. The thematic resonance comes from the fact that Jarmusch has made a film that is mainly about the pleasures and difficulties of talking to other people. (Come to think of it, many of his films are partly about this.) Each tete-a-tete has its own balance of power, and several of them are defined by a specific circumstance: who is the summoner, and who has been summoned? In “Cousins?” Coogan toys with Molina before delivering a smackdown; in “Cousins,” Blanchett plays both sides of the class struggle, appearing as both the Hollywood celebrity and her earthy cousin, jealous of and annoyed by the trappings of the other’s success. The cumulative effect of all these deliberately off-hand encounters is perhaps a little precious, but the experience is still worthwhile. Even if it is nothing more than a self-consciously hip assemblage of downtown celebrities paying homage to the lost art of hanging out in coffee shops — and at its best, it is more than that — it manages to keep the whiff of real people and everyday life about itself, which is tribute enough to the human condition. And the ultimate segment, with Rice and Mead fading into the New York twilight, toasting the worlds that used to be, is nostalgia verging on the mystical.