Song to Song was supposed to be Terrence Malick’s paean to indie rock. The New Hollywood legend spent years documenting SXSW and other Austin music festivals for the movie, making headlines as early as 2011 for a scene in which Christian Bale supposedly pounded bongos with Fleet Foxes. Its three main characters work in the music industry, recording artists join A-list actors in its cast, plenty of its action takes place at live performances, its soundtrack features Julianna Barwick and Sharon Van Etten, and a seven-inch record adorns its poster.

But despite all that, Song to Song is not really about indie rock—and not just because neither the bongo scene nor Malick’s footage of Arcade Fire and Iron & Wine made the cut. Although there are plenty of musicians on hand to lend credibility, this story has so little to do with the arts of songwriting and performing, its subjects might as well be investment bankers. Beyond the rock‘n’roll window dressing, *Song to Song *turns out to be just another minor variation on Malick’s favorite theme—the power of love and spirituality to transcend the life-poisoning curses of ambition and greed—and not a very effective one, at that.

The film begins with a confession: “I was desperate to feel something real. Nothing felt real,” Rooney Mara’s Faye recalls, in one of Malick’s trademark whispery voiceovers. Over a montage that includes shots of men slamming their bodies together in a festival’s muddy circle pit, she confides that she’d been seeking out violent sex. “I wanted to live,” she insists. “Sing my song.”

Faye is, in fact, a young singer and songwriter, although the shape of her aspirations isn’t entirely clear until midway through the film. She hopes that an entry-level job with a fabulously wealthy music-industry macher named Cook (Michael Fassbender) will be her ticket to success. We watch them go to bed together. “I thought he could help me, if I paid my dues...” she intones.

Then love intervenes. Faye falls for another musician, BV (Ryan Gosling), and Cook sets about making him a star—a process that takes place almost exclusively offscreen. But she and Cook secretly continue their affair, even as the bonds of ambition and desire bring all three closer together. The triumvirate travels to Mexico, where Faye has an epiphany that her romance with BV is the real thing. No one captures the magic of a world viewed through the lens of infatuation with more golden-lit poignance than Malick’s longtime cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki. But the glow fades once Faye and BV settle down together.

Built on a festering lie (and questionable business deals), none of these relationships can last. As all three characters move on to new lovers and continue chasing fame, money, or debauched oblivion, Malick’s favorite question pops up: can an existence defined by striving and struggle, rather than true love and harmony with the universe, ever bring fulfillment? His cinematic manifesto, 2011’s The Tree of Life, presented the tense, combative “way of nature” and the open, peaceful “way of grace” as two diametrically opposite approaches to life. If you’ve seen that film, Song to Song’s groan-out-loud idyllic ending couldn’t possibly surprise you.