In the first ten minutes, you realize this is going to be a melange of a Woody Allen black-and-white paen to New York and Lena Dunham’s HBO sensation Girls. Dunham’s show is an entertaining but often frustrating characterization of four girls, post-college, making their way in the world of New York City via witty, self-satisfied rejoinders and copious infusions of cash from their parents. Loaded with self-esteem but no brightly discernible skill, Dunham’s quartet negotiate the shoals of a hip, ever-changing landscape while coming to the realization that every girl with a B.A. from Oberlin is not destined to be a smash in the literary and art worlds. It’s hard to like her characters, especially, Dunham herself, whose Hannah is so grotesque, self-involved and deluded that you’re often left cringing or sputtering in amazement. Or, at almost 50 years of age and closest in sensibility to her poor beleaguered parents on the show, I am.

Still, Girls is a solid work, surprisingly addictive, and it always elicits a great discussion that can range from generational rot to what the cool kids are into these days. I also credit Dunham with either knowingly or unknowingly crafting a sharp indictment of extended, subsidized adolescence, and despite her ridiculous persona as her star ascends, I think she knows it. Or she should.

If Girls were a quintet, the protagonist of Frances Ha, Greta Gerwig, would play the mopey, co-dependent would-be dancer. Unfortunately, Frances is not in the hands of Dunham, who could effectively compensate for Frances’s pathetic existence with humor or humanism. Instead, she’s in the hands of a filmic sadist, Noah Baumbach, whose characters are often so vile and/or degraded that you wonder if the point of the exercise is solely to make the audience feel better about themselves. As the divorcing parents in Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale, Laura Linney and Jeff Daniels are positively toxic, as is Nicole Kidman’s abusive, miserable mother in Margot at the Wedding. Ben Stiller’s Greenberg is similarly noxious, though at least Baumbach offers some redemptive qualities near the end of that film.

The difference between those characters and Frances, however, is that they are in varying positions of power, whereas as a 27 year old Vassar grad who is as much a dancer as I am a power forward, Frances is at the mercy of her surroundings and singularly ill-equipped to handle them. You can feign amusement at her plight in the various uncomfortable situations Baumbach creates for her only so long before you feel guilty. Baumbach may have caught on to his excess, because in the last five minutes, Frances develops character, self-esteem and a place in this world for no apparent reason other than to avoid a mass suicide at the local cineplex.

The opening scene, where our beleaguered protagonist Duncan (Liam James) has to endure a numeric assessment from his mother’s new boyfriend (Steve Carell, who deems Duncan a “3” on a 1 to 10 scale for his layabout ways) reveals a great strength and a great weakness of the film.  James, as an awkward, inward 14 year old dragooned to Carell’s beach house with his mother (Toni Collette) for the summer, exhibits all the hideous hallmarks of the age. He’s ungainly, goofy and paralyzingly shy.  Carell also keenly occupies his type – an exact, sly bully who masks his menace in the cause of trying to be a father figure.  Everyone time he says “hey, buddy”, it presages a cut, an attack, and therein lies the problem with this coming of age tale.  With Carell identified as a villain from the get go, little that occurs next is unexpected or fresh.

That said, the script, from the Oscar winning writers of The Descendants (Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, who also co-direct) is assured.  The story of Duncan’s growth under the tutelage of Sam Rockwell, a comic guru who runs the local water park, takes pity on Duncan, and gives him a job, is the heart of the picture, and their banter is really very funny and often surprisingly touching.  As Duncan’s mother loses herself in Carell’s world, we know  Carell must be slayed.  While we wait for that inevitability, however, Faxon and Rash have a blast with the water park and all of its quirky characters (including both Faxon and Rash, who are both very funny as well).  Carell’s coterie at the beach are also well written, if not fully developed, with Allison Janney delivering the lion’s share of the killer lines, most of which are directed at her own son, who has a wandering eye she insists be covered up by a patch.

There is triumph and happiness at the end of the picture, as you knew there must be, but with a little more care and guts, the writers could have made a great film.  Instead, in the middle, they so vilify Carell that they do lasting damage to the story.  Duncan goes on a boat trip and Carell forces him to wear a ridiculous life vest while the much younger kid with the wandering eye is unburdened.  The cruelty is too much.  It robs Carell of any chance of being anything but a caricature, demeans Collette, and is so humiliating to Duncan that you start to lose sympathy for the kid.  I don’t think Faxon and Rash wanted Carell’s numeric assignment to find purchase with the audience, but that’s what they risked.

This film is a similar to, but not as good as Adventureland.