Spectacularly from the skies or merely in men’s minds, the end of days is certainly on the screen. In an Ohio head in Take Shelter, the Apocalypse Now Syndrome is real in three New York Film Festival selections. The American entry among them is giveaway-titled 4:44: Last Day on Earth, already shown at Venice. Commenting onstage with co-lead Shanyn Leigh, director-writer Abel Ferrara answered where the doomsday fad comes from, with “God only knows, but everyone’s putting his two cents in it, proof positive that the Zeitgeist is there. As an artist, creativity depends on what’s out there.” What’s out there is interest in Nostradamus and the Mayan Long Calendar.

Unlike most earlier takes, which veered towards sci-fi, his goes in for zero special effects. Its Aurora Borealis is real, and the visual physical celebrates Manhattan’s Lower East Side and its denizens. On a friend’s advice, the movie stays closer to The Twilight Zone, and the barrage of mostly actuality clips on small screens is purposely pretty mundane: gurus on spirituality, ex-politicians and experts, lighted candles on tiny floating objects, talk shows, news anchors, guys on guitars and the Dalai Lama on ecology, a Chinese-food delivery boy’s (Trung Nguyen) family, and the Lombardi Parkers’ 1961 championship victory over Dallas (which young Wisconsinite Willem Dafoe actually attended).

Screens are, in fact, all over, from TVs through laptops and smartphones, scattered among Buddha statuettes, mandalas, abstract hangings and symbolic representations in the New Age-y flat of Cisco (Dafoe) and Skye (Leigh). Taped to the floor, dried by fans and hair blowers, her Pollock-type drop-splatter-dribble gestural abstractions take up more space than the sparse furniture in an apartment with roof access, the sort of unattainable dream that movies foist on the world and of which Ferrara admitted, “she or he, or someone, must have money.” Who they are as a couple or as individuals is not developed.

The elevator opening directly into it, occupying an entire floor the real-life artist’s loft serves essentially as the location setting. Once he does escape a bit, down a staircase across the roof and, skirting tranny street hookers and such, up a fire escape to Javi’s (José Solano) apartment, where drugs, drink, sex or abstinent clear-headedness are friends’ weapons of choice for confronting annihilation.

For humanity has abused the planet too much too long, global warming has accelerated exponentially and unexpectedly, and, no denying it, man’s existence on Earth will end at 4:44 tomorrow, November 5, 2009. The End is not the thing but, rather, how one deals with it. “Everybody knows they’re going to die, the one fact everyone knows,” said Leigh at the press conference, and “can be prepared and not morbid about it.”

Cisco does see a neighbor’s leap into space, does grab for some of the hard drugs he has sworn off on, and does break down a time or two. “Locked into his Internet” world more than his much younger companion, electronically P2P he contacts friends, finally locates his teenaged daughter (Triana Jackson as DeeDee or JJ), and argues with her mother (Dierdra McDowell). Thinking her man still in love with that ex, Skye grows hysterical and Skypes her chain–smoking but soothing mother Diana (Anita Palenberg). In between, the couple eat, dance a few seconds, and make love often and explicitly, even atop her paintings, one of which writhes to become a blue-on-white dragon maybe circling to bite its own tail and in the process enfold the two.

Though the Rockies may tumble and Gibraltar crumble, in their cocoon of gadgets and unheeded white noise from mechanical voices, they could see and hear about it. But such is not this film, and, “dying already,” not with a whimper or a bang, their having each other is small but the only consolation.

4:44: LDoE is a play for two characters. Watching Cisco and Skye work it out, however, is no screen consolation for viewers.

(Released by IFC Films; not rated by MPAA.)