Casey, a skinny, nervous nebbish — played, it may be redundant to add, by Jesse Eisenberg — lives alone with his dachshund in a nondescript apartment in an unidentified city. He works in the accounting department of a company that is as generic as everything else in “The Art of Self-Defense,” a wobbly sort-of satire written and directed by Riley Stearns.

The most notable — or, at any rate, a notably puzzling — aspect of Casey’s environment is the technology that seems to place the film in the fast-receding, nostalgia-eligible recent past. Casey watches an old movie on a boxy television set with a fuzzy picture. The answering machine connected to his landline phone clicks on to tell him he has “only one new message.” He gains access to pornography by borrowing a magazine from a co-worker’s desk and photocopying the pages. A crucial plot development will turn on the discovery of a room full of VHS cassettes.

The period details, the nowhere setting and the deadpan delivery of most of the dialogue signal vaguely allegorical intentions. Casey is a milquetoast Everyman, scared of the shadow he is almost too insubstantial to cast. After he is beaten up by marauding motorcyclists, he falls under the sway of a local sensei (Alessandro Nivola), whose soft baritone and hypermasculine message have a transformative effect on Casey.

The vibe is less “Karate Kid” than “Fight Club,” minus the aggressive stylistic poses and the apocalyptic mumbo-jumbo. The s ensei’s conception of manhood is bizarre, but not entirely far-fetched, since there are plenty of guys in the real world who believe dumb stuff about what it is to be a guy. He counsels Casey to stop studying French and take up a tougher language, like German. Casey is eager to comply, though he doesn’t entirely embrace the s ensei’s ideas about women. There is one in the dojo — which is to say in the movie — a brown belt named Anna, somberly played by Imogen Poots.