Kevin Smith’s new film, “Zack and Miri Make a Porno,” centers around a conventional love story about two slackers, Zack and Miri, (Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks) who try to fuck in front of a camera for money, and instead wind up making love (and unusable footage). A revision of the slacker-striver configuration found in a number of recent romantic comedies, most notably “Knocked Up,” Smith keeps leading lady Banks from being ahead for once, with the effect that she appears a much more believable on-screen match for Rogen than “Knocked Up’s” Katherine Heigl.

Zack and Miri, who live together platonically in a dreary version of the “Friends” set, spend the initial scenes awaiting their 10th high school reunion, fully aware that very little has changed for either of them. Both work low-paying service sector jobs: Zack at a Starbucks-like coffee shop and Miri at a mall. Unlike the marginalized characters of Smith’s “Clerks” and “Mallrats,” however, Zack and Miri do not actually think they are above the people they make fun of, and are consequently less attached to their alternative lifestyle. For them, such choices are accidental and seem to be only the result of their utter lack of ambition in life.

Realizing that they are flat broke, Zack suggests to Miri that they make a porno, qualifying his request with the remark that porno is now so mainstream that it may as well just be “Coke or Pepsi with dicks.” In fact, Miri is already the star of an extremely popular eroticized viral video (“Granny Panties”), taken by teenagers with a camera phone while she was undressing in the coffee shop’s storage room. Pornography, therefore, doesn’t seem like such a giant leap for the pair; for the film’s sake, it is also a convenient way to finally get the two in bed together.

After borrowing money from his co-worker, played by a scene-stealing Craig Robinson, Rogen quickly finds a cameraman (another former high school loser played by Smith regular Jeff Andrews) and begins auditioning actors. Assembled for the cast are a group of sexually adventurous misfits, each with his or her own special talent or sexual proclivity. There to hold Zack and Miri’s hands during their foray into hardcore are two real porn stars, Kate Morgan and Traci Lords. After failing to shoot their original concept of a “Star Wars”-inspired porno (“Star Whores”) the crew moves filming to the coffee shop after-hours. It’s a situation that bears striking resemblance to Smith’s own experience while making “Clerks:” a film crew composed of friends and a location (a convenience store) that also served as Smith’s workplace.

In fact, the coffee shop in this film does not function that much differently from the convenience store in “Clerks;” although the pretensions are still there, they are ignored for the most part by customers. And so perhaps it is true now that a non-fat mocha frappuccino with a shot of espresso sans whip can be ordered nonchalantly by the same person who would go to the counter of a convenience store with a super-sized soda and a Slim Jim. These beverages are no longer a “prestige purchase” and Zack’s status as a “barista” does not afford him much extra dignity as a clerk. But despite the parallels between these locations, Smith fails to exploit this setting’s specificity in his dialogue and scenarios—and this is the main reason why the film just doesn’t feel as funny as it could.

Always more heartwarming than genuinely hilarious, the mirroring of Smith’s own family-style mode of production seems to prove that (to use an R. Crumb phrase out of context) “the family that lays together stays together.” The bonds formed while on set prove incredibly important to the entire group, and in the end, the cast even bands together to pay off some of Zack and Miri’s bills. In this porno endeavor, it is Zack who works harder than Miri, and this seems acceptable simply because Banks is so much more attractive than Rogen and has less at stake in proclaiming her love. Zack must prove himself by gaining confidence as a director in order to make a move on Miri, whereas Miri has merely to accept that schlubby Zack might actually be the only guy out there better for her in bed than a vibrator.

After her on-screen sex scene with Zack, Miri giggles and glows in a private post-coital moment, but is it really just Zack’s missionary zeal that’s done the trick? What seems to make the relatively boring sex between Zack and Miri actually very touching are the acts of care that have preceded it: Zack helping Miri to pick out an outfit for the reunion and washing her hair with water from the toilet tank when the water’s been shut off. It may be this sex, and not the film’s porno wrappings, that is the most transgressive aspect of the film: the suggestion that what makes a man great in bed within the context of a monogamous heterosexual relationship may in fact be his willingness to do the dishes.

Although this perspective is integrated into a very traditional romantic framework, this film does much to remedy the blatant sexism and homophobia of the Judd Apatow romantic comedy universe. Unfortunately, it just isn’t as funny.