Away, yes. Go, no.

“Away We Go” is co-written by Dave Eggers. So it’s a heartbreaking work of staggering inconsequence.

The film proves again, if any more proof were ever needed, the primal importance of a story. Without a conflict and movement toward its resolution, there is nothing in a movie to maintain our interest.

“Away We Go” doesn’t have a conflict. It doesn’t even have a situation. All it is is a self-indulgence.

Then again, it is co-written by Dave Eggers, whose “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” takes self-indulgence to a whole new dimension.

In the film’s minimal (at best) plot, John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph play an unmarried couple who are expecting a baby. They travel around the country (and Canada), visiting with wacky friends and relatives. The end.

Seriously, that’s all that happens. One reason for the trip apparently is to decide where they want to move. They eventually pick the charming old house with a ton of character and a huge yard right on a highly valuable lake front, that they can have for free.

Good call, guys. Hope that wasn’t too strenuous a decision.

The whole film is made up of scenes that would be incidental to other films, mildly interesting but unimportant. The two main characters visit his parents (Catherine O’Hara and Jeff Daniels), who announce they are moving to Belgium before the baby comes. The main characters think this is the most selfish thing they have ever heard, and here is the kicker: They’re serious. But then, that is the world of Dave Eggers (the co-writer is his wife, Vendela Vida) -- as he showed in his navel-gazing novel, he doesn’t understand why everyone else can’t see that he is at the center of all life.

Then the characters go to Phoenix to visit friends (Allison Janney and Jim Gaffigan as singularly inappropriate parents), then to Tucson to go bathtub shopping with her sister (Carmen Ejogo), then to Madison, Wisc., to visit his weird hippy earth-mother friends (Maggie Gyllenhaal and Josh Hamilton), which at least is a little funny, then to Montreal to visit college friends who are apparently perfect parents (Chris Messina and Melanie Lynsky), and then to Miami to visit his brother, whose wife just left him (Paul Schneider).

The Montreal friends show their children a video of “The Sound of Music,” and we envy the children. They, at least, are watching a movie with a story.

The director is Sam Mendes, who made such a striking impression with “American Beauty.” But that was 10 years and four movies ago. His work since then has been in a steady decline: “The Road to Perdition,” “Jarhead,” “Revolutionary Road” and now this. Mendes’ direction of “American Beauty” was flamboyant and mesmerizing, but maybe that was because he was working from such a great script by Alan Ball.

Nothing happens in the script to “Away We Go.” Perhaps taking his cue from that that fact, Mendes’ direction is lackluster and almost perfunctory. It lies cold and motionless on the screen, like a trout.