New year, new genre; the cinema these days gobbles them up and spits out the pips before you draw breath. First we had the road-to-nowhere losers of Steve Buscemi's delightful debut Trees Lounge, now the small town blue-collar ennui of Alan Taylor's

first feature, Palookaville. The added ingredient, crime.

Jersey City. Three young misfits bust in the rear of a neighbourhood jewellery store but find themselves instead in the bakery next door, the only ice on offer that atop of an iced bun.

The bespectacled Sid (William Forsythe) has a ratty apartment with his two beloved but malodorous dogs. Russ (Vincent Gallo) shares with his mother, sister and beefy "cop-in-law" Ed (Gareth Williams), the sort of dolt who wears his gun around the house. Girlfriend Laurie (Kim Dickens) lives across the way with her dreams of Los Angeles. Elsewhere, the nervy Jerry (Adam Trese) is married with a kid, but his wife loses her supermarket job when he beats on the boss for pawing her in the back office.

The three try their hand at running a car service for OAPs, but the local taxis take violent exception. Then a chance encounter inspires them to devise a half-arsed-clever plan to heist an armoured car. "I'm not talking about a life of crime," Russ explains. "I'm talking about a momentary shift in lifestyle."

The setting of David Epstein's enthrallingly low-key, non-naturalistic script (from the short stories of Italo Calvino) is defiantly small scale - all half-empty parking plots, rain-splashed streets and run-wild scrubland. Even the aged armoured car - and its equally aged crew - look to be authentic refugees from the B-movie they watch for inspiration.

The film, therefore, relies on its performers to breathe life into this singular lack of ambition. Forsythe (almost unrecognisable from Fleder's Things To Do In Denver) and Gallo (the guest of honour at Ferrara's recent Funeral) are terrific as these nearly-men, capable of so much more if only they could commit to something, anything. Trese is even better, his Jerry trapped more by life than decision; a man who committed and has equally little to show for it. Their ensemble work is superb. Also welcome - if largely wasted - is Francis McDormand as the local tart-with-a-heart Gallo uses as a sounding-board.

The film (the title from On The Waterfront: "one-way ticket to Palookaville") is sweet, even good-natured, Rachel Portman's Felliniesque score hinting at a level whimsy the film never actually descends to. Epstein's genuinely funny script is engaging, throwing curve-balls just when we've got its measure. It maybe lacks the sweaty, harder-edged desperation that ultimately made Trees Lounge so good, but we can pay few better tributes than to say that not so long back Buscemi himself would have been essaying Sid or Russ. Taylor has here hatched a small but very real charmer.