No, it's not.
For all the bad press heaped upon Zyzzyx Road from various online critics: professional journalist and bloggers both, their QWERTY-bashing is based on the film's box-office notoriety and not the film's production quality, itself. Thus: bad box office means inept film.
Sure, one can name drop the fellow box-office failures of Heaven's Gate, Ishtar and Plan 9 From Outer Space in a sentence alongside Zyzzyx Road, but writer-director John Penney is no Tommy Wiseau in either department and Leo Grillo is no Neil Breen in the thespin' arena.
As Jeffrey Ressner accurately opined in his February 2007 review on the digitized pages of Time-CNN, Zyzzyx Road aspires as a noirish road picture in the vein of Red Rock West (a stellar, 1993 John Dahl film starring Nic Cage) or U-Turn (a not-as-stellar Sean Penn-starrer directed by Oliver Stone).
What rises Zyzzyx Road to that Dahl-Stone comparison (at least in its visual quality): Director John Penney hired Kevin Smith's go-to cinematographer, David Klein, who framed Clerks, Chasing Amy, Cop Out and Red State (he's since moved on to multiple episodes of HBO's True Blood and Disney's The Mandalorian). Together, with production designer Dorian Vernacchio (Hellraiser: Bloodline and TV's Babylon 5), they effectively capture the remote, Mojave parcels, making great use of an existing desert dumping site and its abandoned buildings, as well as an old mine left over from the days when the lands past Zzyxz Road was a hick town-mining community. Shooting in the desert-under direct sunlight, where lens-flares are the norm-the proceedings are far from amateur.
John Penney's script -- while far from being an Arthur Miller-inspired "Greek Tragedy" it wants to be -- deploys a non-linear approach and begins In medias res -- and probably inspired by the likes of Humphrey Bogart's Dead Reckoning (1947) and the William Holden-starring Sunset Blvd. (1950) and, of course, more so: the film adaption, Death of a Salesman (1951). Structurally, Penney's debut rises not to neither of those classics; for it unspools as a extended, '60s episode of The Twilight Zone (or HBO's '80s mystery-horror variant, The Hitchhiker) that leaves the proceedings not as noir cut-and-dry as most reviewers lead us to believe. Yeah, this would have worked much better as a 20-minute anthology segment (rife with sub-text) than a full-length feature film.
And to say more would be plot spoiling. I'll give this 5 1/2 stars.