It may seem harsh to say that How to Talk to Girls at Parties is one of the worst films ever made, given that it isn’t a cynical studio blockbuster, but an indie passion project with a budget that wouldn’t pay for the Botox on most Hollywood productions. But this shambolic punks-meet-aliens rom-com is directed by John Cameron Mitchell, the acclaimed auteur behind Hedwig and the Angry Inch. It’s also adapted from a short story by Neil Gaiman, it has costumes by the triple-Oscar-winning Sandy Powell, and it features Nicole Kidman and Elle Fanning. If nothing else, then, it should seem vaguely professional. Instead, it’s like a shoddy school play put on by a drama teacher who thinks he’s cool for liking the Sex Pistols.

The film is set in Croydon, south London, in 1977, a period which is a lot more significant to people who were teenagers at the time, as Mitchell, Gaiman and Powell were, than it is to anyone else. Its hero is the sensitive, artistic and annoying named Enn (Alex Sharp), one of three teenaged best mates who are redolent of the laddish trio in Ricky Gervais’s Cemetery Junction, but somehow even more obnoxious. One night they go to a punk gig in a basement club, and then go in search of the after-show party. (Did basement club gigs in Croydon in 1977 have after-show parties?) But they end up at a gathering of statuesque extra-terrestrial tourists dressed in brightly coloured, skintight latex.

The contrast between the scruffy schoolboys and the exotic aliens is the film’s central joke, but because the gathering is shot to look as cheap and nasty as everything else in How to Talk to Girls at Parties, the joke falls flat. The boys might as well have stumbled on a suburban swingers’ evening, although most suburban swingers would have more personality.

One of the aliens is the beautiful, wide-eyed Zan (Fanning), who is, of course, immediately fascinated by Enn: yes, it’s the pathetic science-fiction trope wherein a magical woman is spellbound by the first ordinary human male she meets. This adolescent convention is icky at the best of times, but it’s especially irritating in light of the film’s title. You don’t have to talk to girls at parties, it seems. Just blunder up to the most gorgeous one in the room and she’ll fall in love with you.