Despite taking place in the glittery, plasticized universe of Japanese girlband stardom, a strange drabness pervades director Koji Fukada’s “Love on Trial,” a downtempo price-of-fame drama that consistently takes the least interesting route out of the fraught situations it sets up. Where there’s the potential for incisive commentary on the chew-em-up, spit-em-out nature of modern celebrity, Fukada’s oblique approach has all the rhythm of a popsong’s intro stuck on a never-ending loop: all filler instrumental, no catchy hook.

Happyfanfare is a hard-working five-girl outfit, who have been together for four years. They have risen to the top of the middle, and are eagerly eyeing their promotion to the bottom of the top. The establishing scenes of “Love on Trial” do a decent job of instantly de-mythologizing this milieu of artifice and shiny surfaces, as we watch the band hustled onto a small stage to perform their...