GREENBERG Directed by Noah Baumbach. Starring Ben Stiller, Greta Gerwig, Rhys Ifans, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Brie Larson, Juno Temple 16 cert, lim release, 107 min

Greenberg posits a character flattened by life – and preferring it that way, writes DONALD CLARKE

A KEY SCENE in the difficult, evasive new comedy from Noah Baumbach finds its titular hero, a sour neurotic, in conversation with an unnecessarily tolerant old pal.

“Yeah. Youth is wasted on the young,” the friend says. “I think life is wasted on, erm . . . people,” Greenberg replies.

Delivered with weary sincerity by Ben Stiller, the remark could be seen as an attempt to sum up Baumbach's apparent world view. With The Squid and the Whale, the writer and director proved that it was possible to make a successful comedy about unremittingly ghastly people. The key to the movie's success was that, knowing its heroes were self-important snoots, it wasted no opportunity to skewer them on the barbs of their own pretentions.

The wretched Margot at the Weddingdemonstrated the limits of Baumbach's creative misanthropy. Less satirical than its predecessor, that dreary film offered no good reason to endure the company of its various bores, bitches and child molesters. After that atrocity, Greenberg looks like a distinct return to form.

Baumbach seems to have found a third way between the coconut shy of Squidand the unearned tolerance that characterised Margot. Set in a version of Los Angeles drained of all grit or character – the personalities are as sun-bleached as the lawns – this strange film, once again, focuses on a bona fide jerk, but, against the odds, it somehow generates a degree of interest in its unlovely protagonist. The Baumbach Experiment is back on course.

The film hangs around a scenario that could easily generate one of Stiller’s less cerebral comedies. Roger Greenberg, a former musician, recently discharged from a mental institution, travels from New York to LA to housesit for his more successful brother. He encounters Florence (Greta Gerwig), his brother’s mumbly personal assistant, and they begins a sketchy, insecure relationship. He also rubs up against that old chum (Rhys Ifans) and fails to make friends with the neighbours.

Stiller, whose lighter performances have always taken in a degree of neurotic menace, is well cast as a man who doesn’t feel himself worthy of affection. The closest thing he has to a passion is his enthusiasm for writing angry letters to various institutions and franchises. (It is significant that

he doesn’t use a computer. Anybody who regularly receives communications from the general public will confirm that the most deranged missives always arrive by snail mail.)

The dog-eared romance between Florence and Roger – initiated in a weirdly perfunctory outbreak of oral sex – would be the core of any conventional comedy and, sure enough, the relationship does reach a kind of resolution in the closing stages. But the most important conflict in Greenbergis that between Roger and the rest of the universe.

If he were looking to reconnect (and he isn’t) then he couldn’t have come to a worse place than the LA of Baumbach’s imagining. Despite his old friends’ gestures towards neuroses, they are mostly too emotionally flattened to usefully kick against Greenberg’s negativity.

The film makes at least two sly references to Annie Hall(a song in a nightclub and an evening of drug taking). But, whereas Annie's LA still seemed an eccentric, distant Narnia, Greenberg appears to believe that numb Californian sedation has captured the world.

He has a point. In fact, for all his pettiness and cruelty, Roger seems more attuned to the modern world’s absurdities than do his supposedly stable friends. We never quite come to sympathise with him but, as the film progresses, we do get to understand the roots of his discontent. In achieving this, Baumbach has pulled off a fairly impressive sleight of hand. Hollywood rarely invites us to take interest in a character for whom we feel so little empathy.

Life may be wasted on Greenberg, but he does deserve the movie that bears his name.