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The Wilson brothers—Luke, Owen and Andrew—seem to be having great fun emulating the sort of offbeat, scruffy comedies produced in the seventies with “The Wendell Baker Story.” It’s a pity we can’t share their enjoyment. The tone of strained whimsy combines with a strenuously laid-back approach to make for a shambling, episodic movie that, in the end, just droops along to nowhere.

Luke, apparently with an eye to films like “The Flim-Flam Man” and “The Stunt Man,” has written for himself the plum role of a genially grubby Texas scam artist who’s roped his buddy Reyes (Jacob Vargas) into a scheme to provide illegals from across the border with phony driver’s licenses. His rowdy arrest not only takes him to Huntsville Prison but ruins his relationship with the girlfriend who’d been pressuring him to go straight—the lovely Doreen (Eva Mendes).

While behind bars Wendell not only ingratiates himself with all the gang factions inside, but decides to study in order to prepare to go straight after his release. His subject of choice is hotel management, and though after he’s paroled he’s distressed to find that the henpecked Reyes is no longer available for service and that Doreen is now linked with a hot-tempered grocery store manager (Will Ferrell), he lands a job at a run-down retirement hotel called Shady Grove.

All is hardly well there, however, as the place is run by head nurse Neil King (Owen Wilson), a wily, mean-spirited con man who makes the easygoing Wendell look like a piker. In tandem with his loyal lackey McTeague (Eddie Griffin), King runs a Medicare-fraud scheme that takes advantage of his “guests,” who include incorrigible Boyd (Seymour Cassel), his morose pal Skip (Harry Dean Stanton) and reclusive Nasher (Kris Kristofferson). Good-natured Wendell naturally makes common cause with them, and they in turn aim to assist him to win back Doreen.

There isn’t a great deal that’s surprising in this, or in the particular turns the story takes, particularly since “The Wendell Baker Story” is paced to align with Luke and Owen’s personal approaches, which means that it shuffles along in a rambling, enervated, slightly scattered fashion that can be likable in fairly short doses but proves more than a little deadening over the long haul. There’s some charm in watching Cassel and Stanton doing what amounts to a thespian soft-shoe routine (it’s the equivalent of what one hopes would have emerged had George Burns and Jack Benny been able to star, as was once planned, in “The Sunshine Boys”), and Kristofferson is…well, Kristofferson, in the deus ex machina role that unfortunately fails to provide the expected twist. The only real spurts of sustained energy come from Griffin and Ferrell, with the latter doing one of his madman rants. But at least he doesn’t strip this time around.

Technically the picture cultivates a ragged look mirroring that of its characters, which is certainly of a piece with the seventies-style concept. And it boasts a roster of tunes carefully chosen to accentuate the goofy retro mood. All of which makes it feel all the more affected. “Wendell Baker” won’t sour the reverence some feel for the same movies of the seventies that Luke Wilson seems to love, but it won’t do much to enhance it, either.