The biggest, or at least most interesting, name on Game 6’s marquee is screenwriter Don DeLillo’s. The novelist’s inclusion lends this speedily dashed off (in under 20 days), and cheaply produced (it cost well below one million dollars) curio a glimmer of prestige. Not everything DeLillo has written has been a mammoth like Underworldor a zeitgeist-seizing classic like White Noise; he’s penned several minor stage works. But surely there’s nothing in his oeuvre to match the idle frivolity of Game 6, or at least the 87 minutes of which we see onscreen.

There are hints of quality DeLillo here in the snatches of funny dialogue (“He doesn’t have the kind of life you think he does, he doesn’t even have a toilet.”). A sudden asbestos storm on a New York City street recalls the “airborne toxic event” from White Noise, while the opening midtown traffic jam echoes Cosmopolis (written later than Game 6’s first draft). One of the few things people actually do know about DeLillo the man is that he’s a baseball lover, and indeed Game 6 explores the metaphysical passions and frustrations of a man whose well being is inextricably tied to a favorite team’s game-to-game fate on the diamond. In playwright Nicky Rogan’s case that team is the Red Sox, the “cursed” authors of so many self-thwarted triumphs. The Sox’s failures help fuel Nicky’s conscious, detached angst. (That the team finally shook the curse doesn’t necessarily deflate this period piece).

The movie is set on October 25, 1986, not only the date of the titular Sox-Mets Series game but also opening night of Nicky’s new play, the “boulevard comedy” writer’s most personal and ambitious yet. The day turns out to be momentous in other ways, too, as marital and extramarital relationships unravel, and friend and ex-playwright Elliot (a very haggard Griffin Dunne) ominously warns him to beware the critical dismembering awaiting him courtesy enfant terrible theater critic Steven Schwimmer (Robert Downey, Jr.), whose write-up shattered Elliot’s sanity years ago. Opting to catch the game rather than attend the opening, Nicky is finally forced to accept certain realities about his own character as he watches the Red Sox’s grand scale self-destruction.

Sometimes a careless, light touch can work for a movie, but Game 6 exudes hurried indiscretion and sighs of “let’s get this over with” just inaudible off-screen. Director Michael Hoffman is no foreigner to lightweight fare, but at least stuff like Soapdish and the perfectly tolerable One Fine Day had detectable pulses of vitality. Game 6 merely droops. Most tired is Downey, Jr.’s hackneyed characterization as the “wacky” critic. Clearly dreamed up in a confused huff, Schwimmer’s eccentric daily rituals (robed meditations and Buddhist rituals, wearing wigs, carrying a gun) and pretentious platitudes (“the truth is never gentle”) are played for laughs. It’s clear that DeLillo, Hoffman, and Downey, Jr. thought that they were satirizing something actual. Either way, Schwimmer left my screening’s audience understandably mute.

Game 6’s leadenness cannot be attributed to Michael Keaton, if only because his twitchy, apparently not (but possibly) coked-up mannerisms aren’t dulling with age. As in his brilliant turns as Detective Ray Nicolette in Jackie Brown and Out of Sight, Keaton as Nicky Rogan is skittishly coiled, if more ruminative. The movie’s best bits are Keaton solo, as he’s the only non-caricature. His monologues while watching the game in a bar strike authentic notes of pent-up pathos, even if the scene’s genuine suspense owes more to the Mets and Sox than Keaton or Hoffman, who liberally lingers on the screen, teasing out the dramatic irony.

Ultimately, DeLillo deserves the blame for Game 6. Hoffman’s no magician. No director could have taken this screenplay — hobbled with the played-out framing device of a recurring radio show jock (named, I’m afraid, The Lone Eagle) and creaky city imagery like “taxis slipping through the neon” ­ and produced what celluloid dreams are made of. Audiences will be forgiven for their curiosity about a DeLillo movie (an upcoming Barry Sonnenfeld adaptation of White Noise offers slim hope of redemption,) but in this case the lure is a con.