Imagine Richard Linklater's Waking Life minus the snazzy animation and sweet, soulful worldview, and you're partway towards locking down the pedigree of this punch-drunk French folly.

No Rest for the Brave bounces its sleep-deprived protagonist through a phantasmagoria of uproarious gatherings, ghostly villages and burlesque bus rides. It's a film so wired on caffeine that it confuses insight with banality, and daring with dunderheadedness. You long to fix it some cocoa and lie it down in a darkened room.