Noah Baumbach has certainly been going to some dark places with his most recent efforts, at least his most recent directorial efforts. He’s also been collaborating with Wes Anderson, co-writing the screenplays on The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and The Fantastic Mr. Fox. It’s almost as if working on that comparatively sunny fare has allowed him the latitude to pursue his grimmest instincts elsewhere, an approach perhaps further triggered by that partnership roughly coinciding with Baumbach having a significant breakthrough with the tough, seemingly autobiographical The Squid and the Whale. He followed that with the harsher Margot at the Wedding, and now comes Greenberg.

The new film stars Ben Stiller as the title character, a world-class misanthrope who takes up residence in his brother’s home while the sibling is away on a family vacation. Greenberg has recently been released from a mental institution, and is trying to dedicate himself to doing nothing, taking a project no more significant that constructing a doghouse, a task he seems to approach with a calculated deliberateness. That spiritual reticence extends to his interpersonal relationships as his instinctual abrasiveness holds others at a distance, except perhaps for his brother’s personal assistant. With her, he enters into a stop-start relationship, almost trying to reforge his own humanity, his own sense of self-worth through reaching out to her in his awkward, damaged fashion.

“Hurt people hurt people” is a phrase that this woman knows well, and embedded in that phrase is a central point of Baumbach’s film. People immersed in their own pain wind up inflicting pain on others, creating a vicious cycle where the anguish perpetuates itself and pulls everyone into its eddy. Baumbach meticulously shows precisely how this happens, how people get wounded and then come back for more. Stiller is especially good at captures his character’s own helplessness in this psychological roundelay, the way his anger builds to a point where it’s beyond his control, or how his anxiety envelops him. As a film, Greenberg is often very funny, albeit sometimes in a laugh-to-keep-from-crying kind of way, and Stiller’s ample practice as a onscreen clown serves him well. His comedic chops are clearly honed. But he doesn’t use this as a method to soften his character’s nasty edges. He plays every part of the man, including his ugliness.

As the woman he encounters, Greta Gerwig is even better. A.O. Scott’s recent mash note to her in the New York Times is a little overboard, but at least where he’s coming from is fully visible. Gerwig is offbeat, charming, and utterly lacking in vanity. She approaches scenes from a sideways notion of what’s going on in them that winds up an uncommon, even startling naturalness to her work. She is completely present throughout, and yet often dares to play scenes, even big scenes, at the emotional level of a murmur, drawing in the audience rather than demanding their collective attention. She operates in tones of intoxication understatement.

That’s particularly well-suited to Baumbach’s work. It’s a shout of frustration delivered at a whisper. It’s a small, slender story that nonetheless carries great weight for the characters that are within it, those who are stuck in the aimless drift of life, where the quiet erosion of unrealized, unstated hopes is as devastating as the most cataclysmic personal disaster. It’s just a little harder to give it a name, to take a swing at it. It is just how life works, and getting through it a perpetual act of refining tactics.