One of Hollywood's odder careers veers back towards the high ground with this thoughtful, dryly funny variation on the 2011 Icelandic comedy Either Way. For the past few years, David Gordon Green has been amusing us with stoner romps such as Your Highness and Pineapple Express.

He has every right to exercise his inner dude, but more than a few fans of early, meditative pieces such as George Washington and All the Real Girls were beginning to wonder if he was spending a little too much time amid the fragrant smoke.

Prince Avalanche – in which two men spend the summer painting road markings in torched forestland – occupies middle ground between the two versions of Mr Green. It is full of very funny lines and absurd situations. But the film is defiant in its determination to travel eccentric routes. It is a near-perfect blend of high and low culture: a comic version of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness or a semi-serious version of Jerome K Jerome's Three Men in a Boat.

Alvin ( Paul Rudd), a slightly uptight fellow with a major moustache, finds himself painting those lines with the somewhat less ordered brother of his girlfriend (Emile Hirsch). At first, they seem set to drive each other bananas. But a sort of uneasy equilibrium eventually breaks out.

Pitched somewhere between theatre of the absurd and bland naturalism, the dialogue gets by on sloping rhythms and dry wit. Tim Orr, Green's regular cinematographer, finds beautiful greys amid glades ravaged by a mighty forest fire.

But what really sets the film apart is its singular tone: simultaneously mournful and wry. One minute the chaps are arguing hilariously about a matter of minuscule importance, the next, Alvin is holding a genuinely eerie conversation with a woman – played by a genuine forest-fire refugee – amid the charred remains of her house.

As a paean to lonely workers in lonely places the film bears comparison with Wichita Lineman. And that's real praise.