Critics use the term “film festival movie” to describe an indie title too narrow in appeal or twee in nature to ever thrive in the big bad world of studio-marketed, wide release cinema.

“East Bay” is such a movie, a Frisco film about a frustrated Korean American (writer-director Daniel Yoon) working out his “not a success” by 40 and Asian-but-maybe not-Asian-enough angst making film festival movies that at least some film festivals would accept, even if no studio deal is ever put on the table.

It features a few ironic laughs, a couple clever conceits, some fun amateur hockey action, and a pair of showcase roles for the female leads. But its mopey, meandering narrative isn’t helped by a choppy, navel-gazing nature, and its black-and-white-flashbacks and shifts in point of view slow its forward motion to a crawl.

Jack Lee’s biggest fear, he confesses in narration to a short-film-in-progress, is “failure.” He doesn’t want to let his Korean immigrant parents down. As they (Chung-Bin Yoon and Taek-Soon Yoon) are always dropping the “grandchildren would be nice” hint, he is reminded that he is not a “success” in their eyes.

Showing up for work in the “custodian” corner of computer programming, hanging with his similarly self-absorbed and at-a-dead-end colleagues — the stoner (Edmund Sim) and the tuned-out video game addict (Destry Miller) — underscores the extent of his “failure.”

But at least he makes his short films, about hockey or fake TV hunting show hosts, with a highlight an “ironic” zinger titled “Korean Comfort Man” that sends-up Japanese aggression and sexual predation during World War II. Such films sometimes get into festivals.

And at least he has a cute girlfriend (Melissa Pond) some slim hopes for the future. Then she gets pregnant. It’s not his. His new film may not make any sense.

If Jack isn’t going to resign himself to his fate — he fantasizes suicide — he’s got to reach out, aim higher with his feature length film, get into festivals, especially the Dim Sum Dance (Get it?) Film Festival, presided over by the fetching fangirl Sara (Constance Wu of “Crazy Rich Asians” and TV’s “Fresh off the Boat”).

And then there’s this distracting “guru” he’s been interviewing about happiness, success, “god” and the like, for a film. Vivacious Vivanti (Kavi Ramachandran Ladnier) bubbles over with affirmations, the kind of dizziness that passes for profound in your lesser known cults, especially ones led by self-help goddesses.

“She is not completely bonkers, unless you take everything she says 100% literally.”

“East Bay” pokes fun at racial and cultural stereotypes, and at how film festivals can seem to prefer films that reinforce those stereotypes.

It’s about family and professional expectations, with Yoon the very face of disappointment as Jack cannot see how he sabotages his possible paths to success in life and work. Wu sparkles, and Ladnier plays the hell of out “hot, dizzy, self-important mess.” Sim also stands out as a classic stoner — using a bear-shaped honey bottle as a bong, etc.

But a lot of what we’re taking in here is surface gloss — the unexplored lives of Jack’s ancestors, the cultural emnity that much of Asia holds against Japan, the cliched “nerds” who play hockey to escape that label, only to get bullied as they do, the shallow pursuit of the exotic when the more apt love connection that’s right there, championing your films in the face of public and selection committee disdain.

Whatever existential angst this slight, perhaps semi-autobiographical story — his first film, “Post Concussion,” hit festivals in 1999, “East Bay” is his second — beats around the bush addressing, “East Bay” never quite crosses that line between “I didn’t mind it” to “I liked it.”

Rating: unrated, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Daniel Yoon, Constance Wu, Kavi Ramachandran Ladnier, Destry Miller and Edmund Sim.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Daniel Yoon. A Level 33 release.

Running time: 1:31