Crass, crude, foul-mouthed comedies have been all the rage at the movies for some time now, with the trendiest comedians from any given year dropping F-bombs, and spouting off rapid-fire fraternity jokes in their (almost always nudity-obsessed) star vehicles. Wet Hot American Summer and The State co-creator Michael Showalter‘s latest offering, Hello, My Name Is Doris, is the perfect antidote to the unending strain of Apatow offshoots: It balances classy, screwball comedy, bone-deep drama, and old-fashioned romance with the finesse of an Olympic gymnast. For once, it’s a rom-com with aims of enchanting and disarming us rather than grossing us out of our minds.

The film’s greatest boon is its star, Sally Field, an actor of age who puts on a performance so range-y, powerful and tender that it all but wipes today’s young, sparkling starlets from memory. She plays Doris, a sixtysomething recluse who’s lived in her mother’s cluttered house in Staten Island her whole life. Doris falls into lonely despair when her mother passes away but thankfully has her job as a paper pusher to keep her busy during the day. She’s the only person over 40 at her company though her role as office outcast could be more attributed to her cat-lady eccentricities (cat-eye glasses, headscarves, wooly knits and all).

Hope of getting Doris unstuck from her rut arrives in the form of her company’s new art director, a strapping, decades-younger Los Angeles transplant amusingly named John Fremont (New Girl‘s Max Greenfield). On several occasions, we get lost with Doris in fantasy as she daydreams about John confessing his love for her in front of their colleagues and hooking up with him in the breakroom. Field is ungodly adorable as she fumbles and fawns, and Greenfield does a good job of keeping us in suspense as to whether or not Doris has got a shot at John’s heart.

With encouragement from her best (only) friend, Roz (Tyne Daly)—who takes her to a life-altering lecture by motivational speaker Willy Williams (Peter Gallagher)—Doris decides it’s time to make a change and begins fashioning herself to John’s interests (facilitated by Roz’s granddaughter, who schools her on the art of Facebook stalking), making a concerted, somewhat creepy effort to cougar her way into John’s arms. Suddenly, she’s clumsily throwing around millennial slang, rocking neon yellow outfits and going to indie electro-pop shows headlined by John’s favorite band, Baby Goya and the Nuclear Winters (where the two “coincidentally” bump into each other).

Just as a tight friendship starts to form between them and the thought of romance doesn’t seem so inconceivable, John meets another woman, bringing Doris’ dreams crashing down. In a drunken fit of desperation, she sabotages John’s new relationship (via a lovelorn timeline post from her fake Facebook account), a plan that naturally backfires and leads to even more heartbreak. Showalter and co-writer Laura Terruso—who directed the short the movie is based on as a student of Showalter’s at New York University—hit every romantic, comedic, and dramatic beat so well that the movie transcends genre. This makes for such an enjoyable experience because, instead of trying to predict where the story’s going, we’re allowed to let go of preconception and go wherever the emotions may take us. Every laugh, every heartbreak, every moment feels sincere, not hokey or contrived. Nothing’s cheap; everything’s earned. The movie’s liberating in that way.

Field is so talented it’s scary. It should go without saying—she’s a two-time Oscar winner, after all—but the sad reality is that female actors over 50 are typically relegated to secondary, tertiary, often motherly roles. Her career, tragically, supports that narrative. But that’s why Hello, My Name Is Doris is such a gift; in all her glory, we get to see Field showcase her unparalleled mastery of physical comedy (watching Doris quiver and drool as John pumps up her deflated gym-ball office chair is insanely funny) as well as her earth-shattering dramatic chops. In the movie’s most powerful, unsettling scene, Doris hops up onto her couch, screaming at her brother (Stephen Root) to leave her house as she tearfully refuses to clear out the piles of old magazines and expired food her mother left behind. It’s scenes like this that reveal the psychological complexity bubbling beneath Doris’ cartoonish exterior. Such a wonderfully weird, layered character is only safe in the hands of an actor of Field’s caliber.

It’s been some time since Michael Showalter‘s Hello, My Name Is Doris premiered at SXSW 2015, where the film’s seasoned star, Sally Field, made waves with an outstanding performance as the titular, socially invisible cat-lady, who we follow as she lusts after her significantly younger co-worker (Max Greenfield). As would be expected considering Showalter’s resume (he co-wrote the great Wet Hot American Summer), the film is exceptionally funny; watching awkward Doris stalk her prey is adorable and awkward and hilarious. But what’s special about the movie is that Field not only makes us laugh, but finds incredible depth in a role that, ostensibly, is a walking cliché. One of the sad realities of the movie business is that actors of age as gifted and experienced as Field are rarely afforded meaty starring roles. But, thanks to Showalter, we’ve got this terrific little film that showcases Field and her talent full-force.

We sat down with Showalter and Field in a roundtable interview to talk about the film, which hits theaters today!

I love Doris as a character. Sally, what was your immediate reaction to her?
Sally: When I read the screenplay, I loved it. I said to my agents, “I want to do this.” They said, “You should meet Michael. What if you don’t like him?” We met, and immediately he said…

Michael: It was about the comedy.

Sally: We were addressing how you can blend both of those arenas.

Michael: The big question for her was, how are you going to do all this slapstick, screwball comedy stuff—the ball pumping scene, the dancing—with this really intense, sad stuff? I don’t want to water either one down to make it a fine line. I want the comedy to go all the way. We want to play every level as loud or as soft as we want. She did ultimately map out a way. She’s crying her eyes out in the scene where she gets drunk, but it’s this sort of dramatic, feeling sorry for herself kind of crying. In the scene where the brother-in-law comes to the house, that’s a different kind of crying. That’s all the way deep down in her. It was about figuring out all these different shades of this character and how to piece it all together so we weren’t repeating ourselves.

The film feels like a perfect antidote to the kind of issue that was addressed in the Inside Amy Schumer sketch that gave that shout-out to you and your career arc. I was wondering if that was a part of the appeal of this character. Here’s a character who’s not defined as a wife, as a mother. She’s discovering her vitality, really.
Sally: The appeal of the screenplay and the character wasn’t in that it’s a “not.” It was such a unique person. A three-dimensional character that really talked about how there are all these stages in life. People always think, “Well, there’s the childhood stage—we know what kind of development goes on there. You don’t know where to put your feet down because you’re a child. Then, there’s adolescence…everyone knows what a tough stage that is. Then, there’s young adulthood—you’ve got relationships and children and a career.” The thing is, those stages go on into your 30s, your 40s and 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s and 90s. Every one of them is this new place that you arrive. When you’re older, society doesn’t let you feel, “I don’t know what I’m doing! I don’t know where to put my feet! I’m brand new and I’m too old to be this new!” That is, in a lot of ways, what this film is.

That is, in a lot of ways, what this film is. She has arrested development, yes. And she’s in her sixties, having a kind of adolescence, a birth of her own voice, her own vision of who she is, what she wants. It has to do with her mother passing away, so her life is just changing whether she wants it to or not. That is something that I really responded to, as well as the fact that age is such a weird thing. Inside, whether you’re 20, 30, 40, 50, 60…you’re still who you are. Who you are is lodged there. Human beings need to make contact with other human beings, so sometimes they don’t match, chronologically. If [Doris had] been the man and he’d been female…

Michael: It’d be Bad Grandpa.

Sally: [laughs] It’d be an Audrey Hepburn movie.

Michael: There’s a line from the movie Grey Gardens where the mother is in bed and Edie’s doing something and the mother says something to the effect of, “I lived my life.” The implication was, I may be crazy and living alone in this crazy house with a million cats, but she’s even worse because I actually had a life! I didn’t start living this way until I got way older. But Edie never even had a life! I did stuff, so I have an excuse to be this way. It’s so sad for Edie. It’s such a dig at her. That line resonated for me, and a lot of that is in this story. What Doris sacrificed for her mother was her whole life! It wasn’t just that—I think you learn in the brother scene that there were gender politics, but these were not areas the movie was going to delve into. But it was very real.

Sally: I always thought Doris was predisposed to be a hider anyway. I always saw her mother as being a big personality who took all the air out of a room. So Doris got smaller and smaller. Her mother was much more of a hoarder, so she’d bring home this stuff to please her mother. There was an injured part of Doris that preferred to hide. I recognized that, and sometimes it takes change to force you out of your own comfort zone. I don’t think she’s, like, a victim within it because I think in a lot of ways she was predisposed to be this way, and they were her choices. She could have walked away. She could have said, “You know what, Mom? Let’s see if I can earn enough money and get someone to look in on you. I’ve got some dating to do.” But she chose not to for a reason. Part of her couldn’t heal.

I think, right now, mean-spirited comedies are sort of fashionable. The humor in your movie is more classic, screwball stuff. We laugh at Doris, but it’s out of recognition. Like, when she’s daydreaming about her crush, we laugh because we’ve all been there. We’ve all liked someone like that. It’s good-natured.
Michael: The comedies I loved were not mean-spirited. I grew up on the comedies of the 70s and early 80s, which were silly—Steve Martin movies, Python, Woody Allen, Airplane! My comedic sensibility is really just silly and light and broad. Physical comedy. I love slipping on a banana peel and stuff like that. That’s always been my sensibility. I just really like silliness. It’s just my own aesthetic.

We mentioned the Amy Schumer sketch earlier in which she used your career to comment on how a female actor of age’s value is unjustifiably tied to her age. Do you find that perception to be accurate?
Sally: Of course. I feel like that’s accurate in show business and accurate in most of society. In this country, ageism for women, not necessarily for men, is a deterrent. You’re talking about show business, but it’s hard for women in every arena. It’s not getting any better. If you add any other ingredient on top of being female, like being of color, and then you add age…The statistics on all of that, of those who participate and whether they be in front of the camera or behind the camera, are pretty horrifying. They do not reflect where we are in society. I think the world has something to work on when it comes to empowering and bringing women to the table. Unless we can do that, the whole world will not heal. We’re out of balance.

About Alex is very much a film of its time. For starters, the film is occasionally hyper-aware, in the Chris Miller-Phil Lord vein, of its architecture as a film imbued with tropes. The film also feels like a clichéd indie where characters gather together and reveal secrets and grievances. But what truly makes About Alex a film of its moment is its intense but clumsy interest in the way recent cultural changes such as the Internet and social media have altered relationships of Millennials.

As noted through casual meta-jokes, About Alex is essentially The Big Chill for a new era: a group of college friends spend a weekend together rehashing the past after one of their own attempts suicide. The meta-ness ends at the passing references to the film’s familiarity though (“This is like one of those ’80s movies,” one person says at one point). From there on out, About Alex falls into the traps associated with its subgenre. Jesse Zwick’s script (Zwick also directed) is laboriously constructed to the point where the summer home the gang goes to feels like it has more personality and well-worn history.

Alex (Jason Ritter) has fallen out of touch with his friends, and it has heightened his depression, causing him to attempt suicide. In a lifeless montage, his old friends receive the news. Journalist Ben has failed to write a book and dodging Alex’s calls. Ben is dating Siri (Maggie Grace; yes, there are, indeed, iPhone jokes made), who fears she might be late. Overworked lawyer Sarah (Aubrey Plaza) still can’t resist the douchey charms of brash PhD candidate and resident truth teller Josh (Max Greenfield, in the meatiest and funniest role). However, Sarah secretly still pines for straight shooting financier Isaac, who brings along a much younger plus one (Jane Levy) to the event.

This is a lot of information to set up but as overwrought as it is, Zwick does a good job of managing it fleetly and quickly. After its belabored introduction, the film settles into a more comfortable, but still far too affected, rhythm. About Alex feels worked over, and this strains its ability to feel natural and lived in. The conflicts are seen from a mile off, and they tend to resolve themselves exactly as one might expect them to – writer’s block ends, quarreling couples make up, etc. At a certain point, the revelations stop feeling like revelations and begin to feel like carefully doled out dramatic beats. As if what the film was trying to say were not spelled out clearly enough, Ben provides a voice-over in two separate instances to lay out the film’s themes and messages. The blandness and familiarity of the story is matched with a drab cinematographic scheme, shot by Andre Lascaris. Lascaris emphasizes muted, autumnal colors, which only adds to the film’s sense of lifelessness.

And yet, when the action lacks a feeling for spontaneity or the dialogue begins to sound too much like dialogue (as it all too often does), the film is saved by its likable, strong cast. The film gives the faintest impressions of why these individuals would have become friends and why they would enjoy one another’s company. In its best moments, the film nicely provides us with the desire to hang out with these people, to get drunk and stoned, and swap jokes and stories. A number of these actors have done some fine work in television (Plaza on Parks and Recreation, Greenfield on New Girl, Levy on Suburgatory) a medium far better suited to low-key hang outs where we learn to like and understand a large group of people. The performer’s easygoing chemistry and the general likability of all involved only gives a glimmer of why we should care. But the characterization and plotting is so thin and dull that it’s still hard to get invested.

There is promise and occasional kernels of wisdom buried in About Alex. But it’s lost in execution. As a Millennial, I have a larger stake in the cultural dialogue of my generation. The claims of solipsism lobbed at us will not be alleviated by a film like About Alex. These are narcissistic, selfish people who turn the well-being of one friend into an excuse to make everything all about themselves. Unlike The Big Chill’s characters, who had been out of college for many years, these characters are just a brief five years removed. Their nostalgia, crises, and bitterness feel a little too unearned. Unlike another Millennial-marked work, television series Girls — which is about the self-entitlement and delusion of people in their twenties — About Alex has no real interest in showing its characters’ actions and behaviors as wrong-footed or dissecting its characters to better understand their psychology.

At one point, in a terribly written scene, Josh tells everyone that his dissertation is on the way texts, emails, etc. are shaping our lives and will become biographical information for history. It’s the film’s clumsiest scene, revealing the gap between the film’s ambitions and what it actually accomplishing. At a number of points, About Alex notes the way we’re more connected and in touch due to social media but how that’s a poor substitute for actual social interaction and connection. It’s not a bad observation, it’s even one that would be interesting to explore further. But the film has such a poor handle on the inherent realities of this new media age that it feels glib and shallow.

However, the film is’t entirely shallow. For instance, when Zwick forces characters to confront Alex’s suicide, the film finds some emotionally authentic moments. When About Alex’s characters remember to not be characters in an indie dramedy, the slow dissolution of their friendships are relatable, if no less contrived.

Writers David Wain and Michael Showalter won over audiences (though not critics) with their 2001 nostalgic summer-camp satire Wet Hot American Summer and attempt to repeat their success with their new rom-com parody They Came Together. The film pokes fun at just about every romantic comedy trope and cliché out there, but committing the same mistakes as the cookie-cutter genre it’s parodying isn’t ironic enough to justify laughs. Many of the punchlines are either beaten to death by repetition or are needlessly explained why they’re funny. And there’s nothing funny about that.

The film begins at a dinner table where Joel (Paul Rudd) and Molly (Amy Poehler) recall how the two of them met to their friends Kyle (Bill Hader) and Karen (Ellie Kemper). Right off the bat the film acknowledges that their story is very much like a corny romantic comedy, as if admitting their own corniness gives the film a free pass. Not long after the lovebirds start describing how they began to date, Kyle blurts out from across the table, “You weren’t kidding, your story really IS like a corny movie!”. Cue the eye rolls.

Both Joel and Molly had broken up with their significant others shortly before running into one other (literally) on their way to the same party. However, it was not love at first sight. The two start off on the wrong foot by getting into a loud argument after blaming the other for the collision. They definitely don’t seem right for each other. After all, Joel works at the Corporate Candy Company which threatens to shut down Molly’s small indie candy shop. Though in the very next scene the two instantly settle their differences in a book store upon discovering their love for the fiction genre. It’s suppose to be ridiculous, that’s the joke.

There are moments where the self-aware comedy works. One of the few laugh out loud moments is when Molly recites a paragraph of specific details while ordering a muffin, only to find out that the entire passage is actually verbatim on the menu. But unfortunately, many of the gags are simply exhausting. Case in point when Joel replies to a bartender, “You can say that again”, who then proceeds to repeat his line over and over until it becomes annoying. A similar instance occurs when someone shouts “swish” after every missed shot on the basketball court. It’s funny maybe once or twice, but definitely not on the fourth or fifth.

They Came Together certainly relies on the undeniable charm of Rudd and Poehler. Maybe a bit too reliant. Both actors do their best with the material, at times elevating the writing better than anyone else could, though even their great comedic chemistry is not enough to save the film. Perhaps that’s why Wain gathers an army of an ensemble including appearances from Ken Marino, Jason Mantzoukas, Ed Helms, Melanie Lynskey, Max Greenfield, Jack McBrayer, Kenan Thompson, and even Judge Judy. These are all welcoming additions but unfortunately all the talent goes to waste with the weak script.

Even a with a short-and-sweet runtime of 83 minutes, They Came Together overstays its welcome with repetitive jokes. The real kicker is many of those jokes weren’t all that great to start with. For example, there is a running joke that New York City plays SUCH an important role in the film that it’s almost a character itself. I suppose this is a dig towards Woody Allen for claiming the city is its own character in his rom-com Manhattan, but I think the joke will mostly fall on deaf ears. They Came Together tries too hard to become a self-aware parody that it forces its humor, generating much less laughs than expected.