Maybe it’s my fault, really. Perhaps I should have watched The Grounded, Alaskan wildlife filmmaker Steve Kroschel’s documentary about the purported healing powers of simple physical, bare-skin contact with the Earth, on a laptop outdoors, on my back, shirtless, and with my feet dug into the soil. Maybe that would have made it make sense. Unfortunately I did not, and so the aims and claims of this rambling nonfiction effort — the filmic equivalent of the jittery, well-meaning neighbor on whom you can’t quite get a read — remain so hazy as to circumvent embrace from even the most sympathetic and open-minded viewers.

The Grounded is at least nominally a first-person, crusading affair, albeit one with all sorts of blurred lines and focus. Kroschel lives in Haines, a small, snow-swept town of 1,700, and after seeing or hearing some random New Age-y news report, he crawls underneath his house in sub-freezing temperatures, strips naked and lies down in the dirt (a sequence he recreates for the movie). The next morning, he’s free from all joint stiffness and pain. The Earth, a “source of free electrons,” has healed him of pain.

Deeming this “an undeniable phenomenon,” Kroschel then conducts some experiments with plants (“Guess which lily kept its petals the longest?”), and bounds into advocacy like an eager puppy. Why isn’t this natural treatment more widely known, he wonders. The Grounded does include some interview chats with figures of repute (Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, and Canadian science broadcaster Dr. David Suzuki), but it mostly indulges an array of figures of dubious qualification or achievement, plus unexplained trips to Stonehenge, and a sequence where Kroschel lets his teenage son and his ill-equipped girlfriend interrogate a physicist. When he’s not tossing off important-sounding yet inescapably vague proclamations (“Gothic cathedrals often times were built exactly on energy hot spots”), Kroschel is busy passing out brown paper bags full of mysterious “grounding materials” to the townspeople of Haines, who later sing the praises of this treatment in curing arthritis, chronic back pain, torn rotator cuffs and more.

Ignoring the fairly questionable scientific method on display, Kroschel’s film mainly just has a hard time explaining or focusing on anything for more than two or three minutes. Some time is given to scientific pushback, but there’s just nothing of much intellectual substance on either side of any debate that might be had about homeopathic electron therapy and its effect on human physiology; The Grounded is an emotional work whose passion is outstripped by its incoherence. For more information on the movie, which opens this Friday in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Music Hall, click here to visit its website. (Kroschel Films/One Paw Productions, unrated, 74 minutes)