The striking desert around Joshua Tree National Monument inspired U-2 to title an album after it and his friends to take the body of singer Gram Parsons there to cremate him. But it’s the uninspired setting for “3 Nights in the Desert,” a wan, soapy love triangle reunion of the “Big Chill” genre.
Travis, Anna and Barry had a band in college. We meet them on an old college radio interview tape, where they speculate on where they’ll be, as a band, in ten years.
Making good music? Maybe, Anna (Amber Tamblyn) wonders. “Making good choices,” Barry (Vincent Piazza of “Jersey Boys”) suggests.
“We’ll either be famous or dead,” Travis (Wes Bentley of “Interstellar”) dramatically declares.
A decade later they meet up at the pieced-together homestead Travis (Wes Bentley) has in the desert, just to catch up, reminisce and open old wounds.
Barry had a thing for Anna. Anna and Travis were an item. Barry’s “good decisions” have made him a tax attorney, with a wife and a future settling in around him. Not that he doesn’t carry a tacky, masturbatory torch for Anna. Anna has taken her music to Europe, turned pop and become enough of a Youtube phenom to have a career.
Travis? He’s not dead. But he’s got a few scars and walks with a limp. He lives in the desert. I’ll bet there’s a story behind that.
Not much of one, it turns out.
Travis has this cave he wants the others to step into, to “learn something” of themselves. He’d love to “get the band back together.” In the worst way. Anna shrugs that off because of the way they broke up. “It was always on your terms.” And Barry sees that for what it is, “a fantasy.”
That’s easy to believe, here, because the rushed nature of this indie film means there’s not a convincing musical moment in “3 Nights in the Desert.” Nobody proves he or she can play or sing.
Tamblyn (or TV’s “Two and a Half Men”) has nothing of the singing siren about her, Bentley is entirely too well-groomed and under control to suggest the wild-eyed artist. Piazza, the most musically tested of the three, has no hint of a “Jersey Boy,” drummer or otherwise, about him.
The result is a love triangle that feels invented, theatrical and artificial and a musical history that we never, ever believe. There’s no commitment there, no idle strumming, little singing and none of the all-consuming passion for music that decades cannot dispel. In Gabriel Cowan’s film, Joshua Tree fails to work its musical magic.

MPAA Rating: R for language and some sexual content

Cast: Amber Tamblyn, Wes Bentley, Vincent Piazza

Credits: Directed by Gabriel Cowan, screenplay by Adam Chanzit. A Monterey Media release.

Running time: 1:22