“Minor-key” and “unassuming” are a couple of adjectives too-freely applied to small-budget, character-based indies like Noah Baumbach’s fourth film, The Squid and the Whale. They’re the kind of reductive three-star praises that only reflect their authors’ love affairs with the obvious. Squidcould easily pass for a cloistered, markedly little piece of work, built as it is around specificities of time and place (“Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York, 1986” reads the establishing title), milieu (Semitic middle-class intellectuals) and incident. It’s been talked up as semi-autobiography: the director, like the lead character, Walt (Jesse Eisenberg), was 16 in’86, grew up in that same neighborhood, and, like Walt, was in the middle of a divorce between writer parents. Some of these might correspond closely to a viewer’s own experience—“You told my story!” will be the reaction among some divorce kids watching Baumbach’s dry, unflinching film. But I don’t think that Squid and the Whale should be measured, or limited, by this, because in its proddingly critical approach, it touches on some stuff a lot bigger than any “I remember those!” jolt from throwback Adidas.

Squid is merciless in calling its cast of characters on their bullshit, underlining the indignities they unknowingly unleash on the people they love and their gulfs between intent and effect. One reviewer tauted the movie as (ugh!) “Ordinary People for the Rushmore set” (Squid was produced by Baumbach’s Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou writing partner, Wes Anderson), but the film’s conclusion—a strange writerly feint—allows nothing like the cathartic Pacalbel’s Canon in D-Minor-scored tidal hug which concluded Robert Redford’s divorce flick. Ordinary People was a Baby Boomer’s film, all touchy-feely “it’s for the best” self-justification; the equal-opportunity offender Squid comes from the generation that had to deal with all the “growing apart” their parents were allowed. “Don’t most of your friends already have divorced parents?” asks the film’s matriarch, Joan (Laura Linney). Yeah, but it’s still not normal.

The story unfurls from a townhouse divided upon itself between warring parents with PhDs in literature, increasingly marginalized academic novelist Bernard Berkman (a flawless Jeff Daniels) and his newly ascendant wife (Linney), who’s just started publishing in The New Yorker. In the middle of a personal renaissance of extramarital sex, writing, and professional expectation, Joan doesn’t bully with her pride like her husband, but she doesn’t need to: she’s won. Defensive, arrogant Bernard is curled up in his disappointment, obscure behind his graying beard, but with hard desperation crystalline in his eyes; his wife is no less egocentric, but triumphantly so. The implication is that, if Joan is writing better than Bernard, it’s because she’s exuberantly reacting to the newly open world around her. But neither of them—quite naturally, maybe—can see past the personal implications of their Big Turning Point long enough to remember their kids.

Two pair of intimate lives are on display—those of the Berkman parents and their children—as they react to the inevitable divorce. Squid’s script is especially smart about one particular side effect of the familial crack-up: the jarring sexualization of middle-aged parents who, in happier houses, might be blissfully written off as comfortably numb, co-habiting neuters. The Berkman divorce plays out as protracted primal scene, a trapdoor plunge for Walt and 12-year-old Frank (Owen Kline) into premature libidinal maturation; the shock drops Frank’s balls and sends him on a frenzy of semi-public masturbation, smearing his spooge on school lockers with an expression that’s uncomprehending of his impropriety, as if he was tidying up after a sneeze. He’s overloaded with input from an adult world that he doesn’t understand, and his symptoms are spot-on awkward: contemplatively laying out his mother’s underwear on her bed, trying on a too-big condom, wallowing in the speculative raunch of the schoolyard (after hearing of his mother’s affair with a friend’s dad: “Imagine Don’s dick in Mom’s mouth”).

Conceited Walt—who echoes all of his dad’s opinions, literary and otherwise—comes off worse than his brother because he doesn’t limit himself to self-abuse. He’s dating a classmate, Sophie (Halley Feiffer), who’s brighter and more sincere than him, and a beautiful girl if you let yourself fall for her, which Walt doesn’t or can’t. (“She’s not gorgeous, but she’s cute” he says—what a prick!) Harassed by his wounded, cagey old man’s advice to “play the field,” Walt second-guesses every moment of togetherness he has with his girlfriend, to the point of oblivious nastiness; after a kiss he pulls back to compliment “I wish you didn’t have so many freckles on your face.” The scene is so right it stings. Baumbach’s characters don’t speak in “realistic” dialogue, cut up with crutch words, but they’re authentic in a deeper, sharper sense—this a knack for polishing homely feelings into emotional lucidity might owe something to Whit Stillman, from whom Baumbach borrowed an actor (Chris Eigeman) and a bit of style in the mid-Nineties.

By placing sex very squarely at the foreground of his story, Baumbach’s prodding at some of our squirmiest memories, those that often sync up the worst to our favored image of self. But this script is smart and human enough to recognize that our most awkward or awful moments aren’t the whole truth of what we are. The Squid and the Whale is a very funny movie, but it’s never cheaply, triumphantly satirical when it hits on a nasty schism—one is the same person when glorying in The Great Gatsby as when rubbing one off to internet smut between chapters. It’s this openness to the range in people, even at their most squalid, that makes The Squid and the Whale so special. To some eyes Daniels’ Bernard Berkman might roar paper target, but that ignores the dogged nobility of his devotion to intellectual difficulty, or those moments where his vague face crystallizes into completely articulate pain (“It was fucking torture, Joan”)—has that aloofness been a safety mechanism all along? The movie’s soundtrack is great at unearthing character-appropriate, period-specific gems (The Feelies, Tangerine Dream), but even better when it lets an entrancing song like Lou Reed’s “Street Hassle” speak for its characters’ better nature.

I’m glad to see the positive notices that Squid has acquired (if a little wary—this flawed, handmade movie isn’t built to stand up under the burden of over-praise). This is a worthy work, though I hate to see critics jump at the chance to toss another cheap crack at The Life Aquatic, whose reception was less honest assessment than a cued-up collective dogpile of backlash. Baumbach’s been a name on the indie scene for close to a decade now, and inasmuch as he’s ever going to break, The Squid and the Whale will be the film that breaks him. But it’s a downer to hear the director shrugging off his earlier films in interviews—as the son of two film critics, Baumbach’s probably unusually receptive to what other people say about him and his movies. In fact Squid isn’t the unveiling of some new auteur sprung fully formed into genius but a heartening continuation to a rather undervalued career. Baumbach’s gift for popping bubbles of intellectual posture is as sharp as ever—classroom scenes with Bernard’s self-styled Lolita student Lili (Anna Paquin, recalling her turn in 25th Hour) might’ve come straight from the English Lit class in Kicking & Screaming (taught by Baumbach’s real-life father!)—and in brownstone Park Slope, where every apartment’s bookshelf seems to face the street from the window as an insistence of cultivation, he gives it a good work-out. His movie itself is a nice razz to Bernard Berkman’s stuffy stratifications of serious and frivolous: it’s a morose work of quotable comedy, observed like a novel but with the fizz of a perfect pop song.