In 2014, the sole Tunisian feature film entered at the Carthage Film Festival provoked a scandal of inadequacy. Created outside of Tunisia’s public filmmaking establishment in a decidedly amateur style, critics panned Jilani Saadi’s Bidoun 2 for its lack of narrative. Even the film’s title denotes something “empty” or meaningless in Tunisian dialectical Arabic; to call a film “bidoun” suggests that it isn’t worth watching. In this paper, I recuperate the narrative lack of Bidoun 2 and read it as emblematic of a new aesthetic of precarious life in Tunisian cultural production. If the golden age of Tunisian cinema (1986-2006) was driven by allegorical narratives of liberal struggle for personal freedom against a neo-patriarchal postcolonial state (Lang 2014), I argue that Bidoun 2 signals a post-revolutionary aesthetic for Tunisian filmmaking dominated by the picaresque mode. Comprised of an interlinking series of random events that resist the closure of grand allegorical narrative, the picaresque is the genre par excellence of political transition and anxiety. Bidoun 2 is a road movie without destination, which follows the peregrinations of two young people thrown together by happenstance: a suicidal youth humiliated in his relationship with a married woman, and a girl who embraces homelessness as an act of rebellion. Bidoun 2 thus departs from the celebration of effervescent youth activism against an aging dictatorial state, and confronts viewers with affects of social malaise that have only deepened in the wake of the 2011 revolution. Jilani Saadi hones in on the boredom, contingencies and anxieties that fracture revolutionary myth making, and lend a sense of indirection to the slack, dead time of provisional governance that has characterized Tunisia’s democratic transition. The film’s narrative style evokes a social milieu where hopelessness and social precariousness continue to be the dominating refrains for the majority of Tunisians after the heat and dust of revolutionary euphoria have settled. Juxtaposing the fragmentary adventures of the film’s key protagonists, together with scenes from recent Tunisian documentary film such as El-Gort and Amirs aux Pays de Merveilles, this paper examines the aesthetic production of everyday life in Tunisia as imagined through the picaresque lens of Bidoun 2.