The walking man in The Limits of Control, a minimalist exercise in the key of cool from Jim Jarmusch, wears through a lot of shoe leather during his feature-length tramp. One of cinema’s men with no names, credited only as the Lone Man, this peripatetic figure is played (and walked and walked) by Isaach De Bankole with a determined gait and inscrutable gaze that initially reveal almost as little as the elliptical storytelling. Like Jarmusch, the Lone Man doesn’t share his intentions until he reaches the end. By that point, though, if you’ve paid attention to the cues and opening credits, you will be steps ahead of both.

Set more or less in the present, the Lone Man’s journey gets going in an airport where he receives some vaguely philosophical directives from a suave number played by the French actor Alex Descas and credited as Creole. Descas’s low-key intensity imbues the setup with a shiver of menace — despite the unhurried pace, it feels as if something heavy were at stake — an air of unease that’s counterbalanced by the dryly amusing fashion in which the Creole’s sidekick (Jean-Francois Stevenin) translates the orders. The Creole speaks in, yes, Creole (translated in English subtitles) and the sidekick repeats them (sometimes with slight modification) in English, which means the instructions are given three times. Repetition, it emerges, is the film’s central structuring device.

That much at least becomes quickly apparent after the Lone Man leaves the airport. Wearing a form-fitting, lightly iridescent blue suit and purple shirt, he travels to Madrid, where he settles into a 1960s high-rise apartment building with a cylindrical facade. There he stays for an indeterminate amount of time. Days slip into night, though it’s unclear if they’re slipping in sequence or during different weeks and months. Whatever the case, the Lone Man establishes a routine that deviates only in its details: he sits at a cafe, drinks two espressos and, at some point (hours, minutes, days later), is joined by a man or woman with whom he exchanges almost identical matchboxes. Other elements: a guitar, a flamenco song and Bill Murray. It’s too bad Murray’s name appears in the opening credits, since his absence from most of the film hints what will happen in the unfortunately obvious climax.

There’s a reductive if sincere denouement inside a bunker with a representative of evil (no, not Hitler) that brings the Lone Man’s walkabout to an anticlimactic close. It’s a lousy letdown, at once naive and too freighted with real-life meaning for a film that — with its thick accretion of pop-cultural and literary quotations — leans so heavily on outside sources for substance and depth.

**The Limits of Control

Starring: Isaach De Bankole , Alex Descas, Jean-Francois Stevenin, Luis Tosar, Paz de la Huerta, Tilda Swinton, Youki Kudoh, John Hurt, Gael Garcia Bernal, Hiam Abbass, Bill Murray.

Rated: R, contains violence, profanity, nudity.