Marilyn Chambers and Nick Jandl in a scene from Solitaire.

One-time porn star Marilyn Chambers caused a stir when she arrived back in her native state last August to shoot the film Solitaire, in which she plays what appears to be the only cop on the beat in Pawtucket in this low-budget local production.

You can see her co-starring performance tomorrow night at the Columbus Theater, in Providence, when Solitaire has its world premiere. (Doors open at 6 p.m.)

It’s a heist-buddy picture, set in 1998, revolving around four teenage friends who have taken to robbing video stores late at night, at the behest of a strange man who runs a Pawtucket novelty shop. Nothing except a handful of videotapes ever seems to be stolen, at least at first. The four are naïve, aimless, amoral characters, and for a long time one wonders how they can be so stupid.

Solitaire follows the familiar arc of friends who get involved in some illegal activity and the one young man who wants to quit, especially after he begins falling for an attractive young woman. Unfortunately, he discovers too late that much more is going down than the theft of autographed copies of Titanic, something that’s played out in the film’s melodramatic finale. In many ways Solitaire parallels Michael Corrente’s Brooklyn Rules, about three friends growing up in 1970s Brooklyn, N.Y., where they get caught up in trouble with local mobsters. Brooklyn Rules opened at the Columbus a year ago and played several weeks before moving over to the multiplexes. Don’t expect lighting to strike twice with Solitaire.

This is a workmanlike production, filmed in black and white to emphasize the grittiness, I suppose. Some of the performances are pretty good — Nick Jandl as Richie, the kid who develops a conscience; Juliana Fraioli as Ruby, the young woman Richie falls for; Chambers as the tough but fair cop. Others seem to be spouting lines as though they had memorized them, rather than words that come spontaneously. The script, by director Victor Franko and Vin Fraioli (the father of Juliana and also Alex Fraioli, who plays the buddy who shows the least signs of redemption), offers little that’s new, save for the bizarrely laughable reason that Richie has gone into robbing video stores. The explanation comes late in the film and throws everything off track. “What! Are they kidding?” one might ask.

Before that there are long, chatty conversations about the pain of being a teenager, but nothing very interesting. If the film had been set a decade later, these kids would have their own pages on Face Book where they could write about their dull lives in the vain hope that someone, somewhere, might be as fascinated by themselves as they are.

Franko’s pacing should have been faster. But there’s little chance of rat-a-tat-tat action in a script that offers few possibilities for that.

**Solitaire

Starring: Marilyn Chambers, Nick Jandl, Juliana Fraioli, Alex Fraioli, Kenny Harris, James Margelony, Anthony Goes, Dave Kane, Short Sleeve Sampson.

Rated: Not rated, contains violence, profanity, adult themes.

mjanuson@projo.com