“You can’t make it in this town unless you’re willing to do some awful things,” says the panicky-looking actor/doorman, and we see plenty of those things in “The Informers.” The late Brad Renfro  plays the doorman; the actor died earlier this year of a heroin overdose. If only he could’ve arranged for a better farewell picture. This one’s a certifiable soul-sucker, dining out on its characters’ venalities while wagging a finger at the horror, the horror.

Aping the loose structure and sunny fatalism of “Short Cuts” and “Welcome to .,” Bret Easton Ellis and Nicholas Jarecki  adapted Ellis’ 1994 novel (written a decade earlier) set in 1983 Los Angeles, where the bored, callous progeny of the very wealthy drive around wearing outsize  Ray-Bans and pleasure themselves with cocaine binges, parties that turn fatal like that, and another round of casual yet deeply affected sex with whomever’s handy.

It’s supposed to be coldly glamorous and amorally unsettling, this depiction of children who spend their days acting out against their unfit parents. Billy Bob Thornton  plays the prime unfit parent, a movie producer unwilling to let go of his TV-newscaster mistress played by a jittery Winona Ryder, even though he’s patching it up with his wife, pill-poppin,’ poolboy-oglin’ Kim Basinger. Directed by Australian Gregor Jordan  as if studying a foreign culture and determined to get a D-minus for his efforts, “The Informers” is all grease and no machinery. It’s a collection of attitudes and poses. The vampire stuff from the book is nowhere to be seen, for the record; also, the child-abduction business （英文影评）resolves in a more upbeat way. Comparatively. If you care. “The Informers” lays on the obvious signifiers (Reagan, Devo) and five seconds after someone watches a report about a mysterious virus on TV, young, everything-to-live-for Christie (Amber Heard) complains of unexplained lesions. The writing is shallow, even for the author of “Less Than Zero.” This is less than “Less Than Zero.”