C+

The first of three films of the late Theo van Gogh scheduled to be remade in English as a tribute to the Dutch director killed in 2004 by an Islamic extremist, Steve Buscemi’s “Interview” is basically a two-hander that comes across like a one-act off-Broadway play that’s wandered onto the movie screen. In this format it’s a sporadically amusing talkathon, but a pretty shallow and forgettable one.

The set-up has arrogant reporter Pierre Peders (Buscemi) moved off his usual political beat to profile Katya (Sienna Miller), a single-name bombshell who’s a superstar by reason of her role in an “Sex and the City”-style TV show and a bunch of crummy movies. Angry about the assignment, which has taken him off a big scandal brewing in Washington, and contemptuous of the world that Katya inhabits, Pierre stews over being kept waiting for her in a restaurant and, when Katya arrives, quickly makes it clear that he’s totally ignorant of her work and despises everything she represents.

Not surprisingly, the interview breaks up quickly, but when Pierre is slightly injured in an accident afterward, Katya takes him to her nearby loft for a cold compress and the two begin talking more seriously, sparring the night away under the influence of booze and drugs and eventually revealing what appear to be their deepest secrets to one another. Of course, as in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”—the touchstone in this kind of picture—people may be playing with one another and all may not be what it seems. And in a game of one-upmanship, somebody has to come out on top.

Nothing that happens in “Interview” seems remotely plausible, and the conversation, with its twists, reversals and surprise revelations, has the sort of cleverness that always feels written rather than real. But Buscemi and Miller appear to be having fun with the script, and as director the former—using Van Gogh’s preference for shooting long takes with three cameras capturing the action from different angles—keeps things moving along while allowing himself and his co-star some breathing room too. The other technical aspects of the very modest production are more than adequate.

But though Van Gogh is certainly worthy of remembrance, it has to be said that “Interview,” while a perfectly tolerable throwaway, is pretty thin gruel, a synthetic gabfest that’s agreeable enough as it progresses but doesn’t really go anywhere or dig very deep. Sort of like the profile Pierre would probably have written about Katya if he’d just done his job.