“Fort Tilden” invites us to spend a long, mishap-filled day with two haplessly annoying young New Yorkers.
It’s like “Girls” with more funky New York locations, but with less sex, and with fewer laughs.
Harper, played with Bridey Elliot, is just rich enough to be condescending to everyone, just cute enough to look down on everybody else. Sure, she’s a struggling artist living off Daddy’s largesse. But she’s sort-of hot and she knows it, and figures she can get her ex back any time she wants. But first she’d like to have sex on the beach with a guy she meets at a party.
With Allie (Clare McNulty), her roomie, coming along. Clare isn’t as cute and is touchy about it. She hopes she has a shot with the guy, too, or the guy’s best friend. Sure, she has her final meeting with the Peace Corps tomorrow. She cannot wait to leave New York. But she’ll call in sick.
“Let’s try REAL hard to like New York today,” Harper lectures. She stages their apartment for possible after-beach sex, moving a copy of David Foster Wallace’s novel “Infinite Jest” to the coffee table. And they’re off.
Only they’re broke. That’s OK, they’ll bike from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to Fort Tilden.
But Harper has no bike. Allie has to beg to borrow one from a neighbor who has a crush on her.
And Harper wants to drop by to see her hunky ex (Peter Vack) surrounded by gay men, lusting after him in the park. That may be the funniest scene in the film.  She wants to score some Molly for their day at the beach.
Then Harper sees this old oak barrel in the street, and needs to buy it from some guy who almost certainly doesn’t own it, and then get it into their apartment.
You get the picture. Harper has the attention span of a salmon. Allie is her enabler. But neither of these two 25 year-olds are streetwise enough to handle the Big City. Allie’s the Queen of Not Following Through, and Harper is a failure at everything who arrogantly mocks everyone else for trying. Their “friends” are “so boring they’re like chapters in a book it’s OK to skip.”
Harper is certain that Allie won’t end up going to “the worst place on Earth (Liberia)” with the Peace Corps, and she suspects potential Facebook updates from Africa are the reason.
“Are you going to HELP people, or to LOOK like you’re helping people?”
Their ineptitude takes them into encounters with a nasty Uber driver, cliched entitled Brooklyn baby-parents, bodegas that have never heard of “iced coffee” and one stupefying yet funny moment when they stand in line at a dress shop and watch and prattle on about the punk who is eyeballing, then stealing their bikes.
There’s funny stuff in this Sarah-Violet Bliss/Charlie Rogers film. But even though it was whittled down from its longer film festival length, it still drags. It’s a simple set-up fraught with promise, but each funny bit points to bigger blown opportunities.
With a more deft touch, this could have been required viewing for any bright-eyed and bushy-tailed 20something with Big Apple dreams in need of having those dreams doused with the cold water of reality.

MPAA Rating: R for language, sexual content, some graphic nudity and brief drug use
Cast: Bridey Elliott, Clare McNulty
Credits: Written and directed by Sarah-Violet Bliss and Charlie Rogers. An Orion release.

Running time: 1:38