The first thing to say about “Greenberg” is that Noah Baumbach has made one of the better “real L.A.” films in recent memory. Almost every scene contains a sharply-observed detail about how life in L.A. is actually lived. Baumbach told Charlie Rose that he had long been suspicious of L.A. until he started spending more time there with his wife (and collaborator) Jennifer Jason Leigh. “Greenberg” is far from an endorsement of his second home—the best it can muster is an ambivalence that feels like the observations of a New Yorker in a lazy, charitable mood—but Los Angeles clearly engaged Baumbach's interest as an artist looking to establish a sense of place.

The film opens with a closeup of Florence (Greta Gerwig) in her car, driving to work, nervously looking in her rear-view mirror to see if the driver behind her will let her merge. “Are you going to let me in? Are you going to let me in?” she asks. Drivers elsewhere may ask such questions, but not in the Florence's knowing tone of plaintive existential inquiry. Florence is an aspiring singer and part-time nanny for the family of Roger Greenberg's brother. The family lives in a tony home nestled in the Hollywood Hills, a place as alien to her as it is to Roger, who comes to relax there after a stint in a hospital back east. The brother, his wife, and two kids are off vacationing in Vietnam; odd choice of location, Vietnam, though it works as a little joke about the brother's ability to forget the past and move confidently into the future.

Roger cannot. He has come to L.A. simply to “do nothing”, as he tells people. His plan involves neither confronting nor forgetting his past, whatever it may be. He seems to want to luxuriate in his own inertia. If traffic in Los Angeles is indeed a steel-and-smog figuration of an existential quandary, it is not surprising that Baumbach tends to film Gerwig stuck inside her car and Greenberg out walking the streets, usually shot in middle-distance with a blur of cars between him and the camera. Few directors have captured the loneliness of L.A. like Baumbach does in his shots of Roger standing on a corner holding a bag of groceries, alone and palely loitering; almost by definition to be a pedestrian in L.A. is to be forgotten and forlorn.

The other point the image gets across is Roger’s aforementioned stasis, and this becomes the crux of the drama. Roger’s problem is not so much that he's stuck in the past, because he’s clearly stuck in the present, too. He’s just plain stuck, a man immobilized for reasons which are never made entirely clear. Anachronistically he writes pen-and-paper complaint letters to various people and institutions, such as Pet Taxi, the mayor of New York, and Starbucks (the best quip in the movie is Roger’s despair at hearing a song in a Starbucks he actually likes— there are books’ worth of insight nestled in that line). These letters establish Roger as a sour and maladjusted guy, but they also provide the few likable qualities he possesses.

Stiller composes these letters with a hilarious lack of affect, complaining so compulsively it comes to seem like a defense mechanism against the city itself. The letter he writes about noise in New York is inspired by the sound of an airplane passing overhead while he wades in his brother’s swimming pool (the distant rumble of aircraft is another accurate detail of life in L.A.). Baumbach’s splendid hint here is that Roger's real problem is his inability to adapt to the good life of southern California. It’s the beautiful sunlight and the crystalline blue water of the pool he's sputtering and flailing in that's the problem, not the noise pollution.

If Roger is unaware of what’s really bothering him, so is Florence. They undergo a rocky courtship to say the least. Most of their interaction sounds like two painfully shy junior high school kids, Judy Blume for adults. Baumbach gets away with this because the dialogue is so carefully written. Even the mumbling and silences seem surgically placed, yet the scenes play out loosely and naturally, at times almost improvisationally. Some of the problems in “Greenberg” are easy to pass over because of the performances of the actors and the synergy they have with their director. Baumbach knows how to milk social awkwardness honestly. There’s a certain courage in the way he lets deadly silences remain deadly. He doesn't allow “button” moments. Scenes aren’t neatly wrapped up with a bow and ribbon.

The birthday dinner scene with Roger, his friend Ivan (the excellent Rhys Ifans), and Florence plays out in a lurching stop-start rhythm that somehow manages to emphasize the apartness of the three people yet mingles them together into bizarre cohesion. They’re stranded together in a lifeboat of loneliness. Roger is in a groove and craves a bigger audience, Ivan as usual is stunned by Roger’s self-absorption, waiting for him to notice his obvious pain, and Florence is in a state of total confusion about her feelings for Roger. These are threads of an unspoken conversation, one as important as the spoken one but, importantly, not more important. Baumbach builds up an engaging amount of suspense foreign to the traditional romantic comedy: there’s a real chance these three souls will go on missing each other completely.

But “Greenberg” does have a few problems. One is the lack of back-story. Not much is needed, but at times the script feels undercooked and, possibly, chauvanistic. Both Roger’s and Florence’s pasts are largely blanks, but Roger’s has an almost tragic aura while Florence’s seems more like the stereotypical bummers common to all twentysomethings. When Roger meets his ex-girlfriend, Beth (Jennifer Jason Leigh), their painful conversation over lunch—she has forgotten shared experiences to which he is obviously clinging—is meant to be poignant, whereas there is zero emotional resonance relating to the ex, whoever he may be, responsible for Florence's pregnancy.

Then there’s the difficulty of Roger’s age relative to Florence, his niece, and her friends. The party scene is fantastically funny in places, as when Roger wants to put on Duran Duran, or the way the camera registers the bored bewilderment on the kids' faces as they listen to him rant away as the bitter, uninvited oldster he is. Yet the scene tips decidedly in favor of the older viewpoint; the younger crowd isn't exactly disparaged, but they remain a sort of unappealing mystery. Roger is shut out of the fun, and there’s a grain of truth to the way he's simultaneously angered and grateful about this. Still, it's a flaw in a film closely tied to two points of view, not one; the movie is in some ways Florence's story, too, not just Roger’s.

Their romance isn’t troubling for the age difference in itself. What’s bothersome is the film’s attitude toward the relationship within the context of Roger’s past. Here we turn to Ivan, the former bandmate of Roger’s who suffered greatly when the latter single-handedly scuttled their promising record deal fifteen years earlier. His rock star dreams dashed by his friend’s fickle refusal t’o “go corporate”, in the intervening fifteen years Ivan has left music to become a computer-fixer, father to a young boy, and a husband in a tenuous marriage. Roger, lethally self-absorbed, repeatedly fails to see that his friend isn’t who he used to be.

At the big house party, Roger’s self-absorption finally stirs up some sharp words of rebuke. Ivan explains that he isn’t haunted by dimming dreams and missed opportunities. He’s simply embraced the life he never planned on. It’s a key moment in Roger’s backward stumble into the light. Ivan has reached a place Roger cannot yet envision, let alone reach. Embrace life as it is, Ivan seems to be telling Roger. Embrace the now, the present, whatever it looks like. It’s a riff on Lennon’s quip that life is what happens when you’re making other plans.

In his own broken, halting, emotionally stunted way, Roger takes Ivan’s words to heart. He begins to embrace the ‘now’ of his life; the unplanned ‘now’ in his life, of course, is Florence. And his old plans? The ones that fell away? The dreams he must discard? Well, aside from the band, we’re never told what Roger’s ‘plans’ were as a young man. He doesn’t seem like much of a planner to begin with.

But whatever his plans may have been, exactly, we can be reasonably sure they included snagging a younger, gorgeous, conspicuously available woman willing to overlook his faults in exchange for minimal effort. For the younger Roger, the Beatrice-like face beaming through the swirling smoke of an unknown future may not have been Greta Gerwig’s, but it was just as lovely and just as forgiving. Simply put, Roger’s having his cake and eating it too. Life isn’t giving him what he wants, man, but it’s, like, giving him what he needs—oh, and a beautiful woman to sweeten the pill. This is the modern male fantasy and it’s played out in way too many films. Maybe you fix hearts, maybe you throw touchdowns, maybe you run governments, maybe you become a maverick filmmaker, maybe you save the world in a blue suit and red cape, but when the time comes to stop messing around and get down to the business of living, always, always, you get the saintly, beautiful, accepting girl who loves all of you, darn it, warts and all.

One day it would be nice to see a White Guy Breakdown movie in which The Life Unplanned For looks the way it does for most people: a trainwreck in which salvation comes from undertaking a lonely and humbling salvage effort. In Hollywood the men learn a lesson or two and then redeem the winning ticket in a magic sex lottery. This is becoming an annoying fixture in comedies made by men (pretty much all comedies, in other words). In the stuff made by Judd Apatow and his crew, to take an easy example, gorgeous girls routinely fall into the laps of schlubby guys (“Knocked Up” is the worst offender). “Garden State” and “Elizabethtown”, from a few years back, offered Natalie Portman and Kirste Dunst as prizes for bottoming-out. Even in what is by far the most downbeat and brutally honest of all WGB movies I can think of, “Leaving Las Vegas”, Nic Cage got to spend his last days with a hooker played by Elisabeth Shue.

In “Greenberg”, a film which initially impresses with its unflinching honesty and rich observational detail, it comes to seem disingenuous that Roger should have the slightest chance with Florence. Baumbach ends the film ambiguously, yes, but it’s chump change in light of the deeper sense that Roger was always going to be spared absolute desolation. With apologies to Allan Bloom, “Greenberg” is yet another case of white midlife crisis without the abyss.