Taking the law into one’s hands against urban thuggery has a history of vociferous audience approval, and now Noise adds the twist of a vigilantism that takes arms to silence a sea of metropolitan auditory assault. From his screenplay, Henry Bean’s film will probably draw complicit exclamations of encouragement from viewers whose complaints go unheeded even though comprising a majority of 311 calls.

Publicized as that “rarity, . . . a comedy of ideas,” the movie takes as starting point a fed-up individual who acts out what others dream of. To counter ignored grievances, he elects himself a majority of one, soon to acquire the petition backing of 56,000 fellow citizens on to a projected 70,000 and more. In the process, his point is proven, politicians get their comeuppance, his potency as citizen-husband-lover is revived and a marriage saved, while others are inspired. This, of course, being black humor wish fulfillment, the story steps off the merry-go-round when convenient, the hero turning down an anarchist (Jessica Almasy) who would bomb signs and thus, too, all the other sometimes dangerous kooks with causes.

Confirmed Manhattanite lawyer David Owen (Tim Robbins) refuses to move back to Illinois or to nearby suburbs, although the city’s white noise drives him bonkers in burglar alarms, buzzers and boom boxes, cell phones and intercoms, jackhammers and garbage trucks, horns and brakes and sirens, unmuffled motorcycles and manhole covers, above all unattended car alarms. In the streets and through their window enters the cacophony he can neither ignore nor accept. He cannot sleep or read daughter Chris (Gabrielle Brennan) to dreamland, concentrate on philosophy texts, enjoy the cello of wife Helen (Bridget Moynahan) or make love to her.

Trousers around his knees after failed sex, he gazes out the window and becomes The Rectifier, who dents hoods, kicks out taillights, shatters windscreens, bends wipers and snips cables. It is not entirely clear, but he has done this before, as an ordinary citizen whose resultant split-screen confrontations with New York’s finest -- not so comic and supportive as the movie’s city clerks -- led to judicial warnings and suspended sentences, then fines and thirty days. This time around, it becomes a one-man campaign complete with printed stickers left like silver bullets by the Lone Ranger.

As in comic books, officialdom is thick and cannot make the simple connections to identify lawyer with audio-avenger. Starting with a decent Michael Bloomberg imitation that switches to a fey-ish suspendered smarminess, John Hurt is Mayor Schneer, who “will not tolerate that type of creep in my city, that vigilante venting his immaturity!” Obscene and insecure, concerned with business and bottom lines, Hizzoner is toadied to and goaded on by Chief Aide William Baldwin.

Both are character actors in the plot, which belongs to Robbins and his sad face, and to the much younger woman who, while detectives bumble, easily tracks him to earth from his attack on her uncle’s (Vladimir Skomarovsky) office alarm. Ekaterina Filippovna (Margarita Levieva) confronts him and wrings out much of the background exposition, first in a bar, then the Chelsea apartment where he has lived since Helen threw the bedeviled man out, and then in bed.

Organized and purposeful before heading to London to study philosophy, she gives direction in the filing of a petition for a car-alarm-law ballot referendum. City Hall being city hall -- it is wisecracked that Rudy Giuliani pulled the same trick -- signature requirements are shuffled, so the legal, or, rather, political route is blocked. Instead, the plain-faced hero who stands for the harassed Everyman, buys a $1,500 Dodge Power Ram pickup, has installed as many noisemakers as its battery will bear, and disrupts the Mayor’s sales pitch to visiting Japanese investors. Shrugging in mock concerned helplessness, Owen is right there in broad daylight, but despite his accessible rap sheet, an irate neighbor who happens to be a judge (Chuck Cooper, as Gibson) is at first fingered by Schneer as The Rectifier.

Pleading his own case before comic jurors (Leora Barish, Helen Hanft), Owen establishes that car alarms constitute not only non-physical aural assault, but battery as well. This new battle plan is less self-destructive, so dismissing an affaire on her part, wife and daughter welcome the hero home. His romp with free soul Ekaterina implied no commitment, and the marijuana and threesome she got him into were no more than an excuse for more unintelligible Hegel that supposedly loosened him up. He is, anyway, more a disciple of that other German thinker, Schopenhauer: “The amount of noise anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity.”

With the improbable exaggeration of much comedy and some easy but distracting chuckles, the hour-and-a-half is minor-key cute, content to be a little movie. A presumably rectifiable dilemma for urbanites needs more serious treatment. There are laughs at foibles here, and agreement on abuses, but Noise resolves things without that felt indignation that inspires action. 

(Released by THINKFilm; not rated by MPAA.)