Only two escape to light up another day: henpecked, brother-in-law-challenged sixtyish barber Goyo (Rafael Inclán) and pretty, browbeaten forty-year-old pharmacy clerk Clara (Carmen Madrid). Modeled after Travolta’s Vincent Vega take on the French Quarter-Pounder, a consideration of smoking pros and cons occupies two petty crooks in a car, Tomson (Jesús Ochoa) and his beloved twenty-three-year-old protégé Nene (Lucas Crespi), though deaths to come are not exactly tobacco-related but from handguns and an ironic Zippo out of The Marriage of Maria Braun. Full of lethal but lovable bunglers who are not to be spared, inspired by Tarantino -- remember that “Three stories about one story” tag? -- as well as tech-surveillance flops like designer-slime Sliver and a dozen caper-gone-wrong flicks, and ad-subtitled “la vida unfiltered,” Nicotina nevertheless works most nicely for those so inclined.

Mexico’s biggest 2003 grosser and star of its forty-sixth Ariel and later MTV Movie Awards, this initial major independent release from former marketing and talent agency Arenas Entertainment marks the first collaboration among three expatriate Argentine friends. Three years ago to the month, Martín Salinas submitted a trio of short scripts, which director Hugo Rodríguez suggested connecting by introducing the two killers in the car. He also came up with the additional “heart of the film” link in nicotine, which idea literally hooked chain-smoker Martha Sosa Elizondo, co-producer with the third Buenos Aires transplant, Laura Imperiale.

The self-proclaimed “fun movie [to which] . . . people in big cities . . . and the neurotic will relate a lot,” begins off-puttingly as another in a line of computer voyeurism spins. Nerdy hacker Lolo (Diego Luna) spies on tenant-neighbor Andrea (Marta Beláustegui), a cellist who carries on with orchestra leader Carlos (Eugenio Montessoro) in hopes of a first chair in Seville. The computer wizard spends less energy cracking the Banque Cantonale Suisse access code to transfer the information to a CD for friend Nene, who will exchange the disc for twenty diamonds from fat-man gangster Svóboda (Norman Sotolongo).

Nearby, the latter “Russian” is having his hair and beard trimmed in Gozo’s barbership, where wife Carmen (Rosa María Bianchi) nags the proprietor about his generous poverty compared to the successful lifestyle of her opportunistic politician brother. In the neighborhood Farmacia Mexicana above which they live, mopey Clara unhappily toils under the heavy thumb of husband Beto (Daniel Giménez Cacho), who berates her for mistakes, demands sex and, going cold turkey on his own two-packs-a-day habit, allows customers to smoke but not his wife.

An unlikely triptych, in the real time of ninety-three screen minutes that cover an hour-and-a-half in these disparate lives, the three will be smartly dovetailed. At the least opportunity, everyone feverishly puffs away, even when a blood-soaked butt is the only available tobacco, and characters are additionally linked through that old warhorse of an innocent mix-up or loss of a key document. Unwillingly dragged in and away from his sexual spying in the first place, Lolo realizes the mistake and tries to set things right. Unfortunately,  misunderstandings, impatience and bad karma interfere, and the situation spirals out of control into unexpected bloodshed.

“Life is full of coincidences; I’m out of cigarettes.”

Toyed with by a contrary-minded fate, characters show up at the worst possible moments, judge from half-truths, make wrong decisions. Shutter-snapping from one locale to another, with an occasional cutesy viewfinder rectangle “from [TV’s] ‘Six Million Dollar Man’” to call our attention, the film and its overlapping stories reflect on the individual’s desires for money, love and supposed freedom and their consequences.

Copycat, hammy in its adoption of Spanish pop covers of standards like “Fever,” once or twice winking in admiration of its own wit, Nicotina is nevertheless undeniably, captivatingly clever. Its numerous characters are well defined and differentiated, and there are nice original touches like a one-man-hating mongrel dog. Heavily dosed with an open black humor that, less deadpan droll, bears the stamp of the Coens, it is bound to win audiences and tickle the dark side of the funny bone.

(Released by Arenas Entertainment and rated “R” for violence and language. )