The Squid and the Whale (15)

Noah Baumbach's poignant comedy-drama arrives from the US bristling with awards and the best word-of-mouth for any picture this year. It's not hard to see why. The Squid and The Whale is a thoroughly grown-up movie, personal without being self-indulgent, charming without being winsome, and generous-spirited without forcing us to watch any redemptive group hugs. It has the sophisticated drollery of a really good Woody Allen movie, which, given that that man doesn't make really good Allen movies any more, feels doubly valuable.

The time is 1986, the place is middle-class Brooklyn, and the problem is the Berkman family. The dad, Bernard (Jeff Daniels), is a college literature teacher who's been soured by his declining fortunes as a novelist; the mum, Joan (Laura Linney), a writer who's had a recent success at The New Yorker, is now having an affair with the tennis coach who's been teaching her sons, 16-year-old Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) and 12-year-old Frank (Owen Kline). Their marriage in tatters, Bernard and Joan announce to the boys that they're getting divorced. He takes a shabby apartment across the park, she keeps the family house, and the boys will shuttle between them in a joint-custody arrangement.

Invisible battle-lines are soon apparent. Young Frank sides with his mother, but expresses his unhappiness by masturbating on school library books and glugging his parents' booze. Walt, at an even more difficult age, takes to parroting his father's sniffy literary opinions and accusing his mother of bailing on her husband because he's not successful anymore. Baumbach is reeling through his own teenage years here, having lived in Brooklyn in the 1980s and witnessed the marital meltdown of his novelist-father and film-critic-mother. And just in case anyone fails to discern the autobiographical nature of the enterprise, Baumbach has given Daniels some of his own dad's clothes to wear.

I wonder if one of those garments was a hair shirt, because if Baumbach Snr was anything like his screen counterpart he has a great deal of atoning to do. Daniels plays him as a monster of near-Dickensian pomposity and egotism. Even his heavy grey beard looks like he's modelled it on God's. He can't seem to open his mouth without aggrandising himself, referring to Kafka as "one of my predecessors" and to his second novel as "Mailer's favourite of my books". He's a classic type, the academic who adores the sound of his own voice (a slightly bored monotone) and can't quite bear to think of anyone outdoing him, whether it's Joan clattering away at her typewriter or the tennis coach running him ragged on court.

Even more excruciating than his arrogance is his meanness: settling up in a restaurant he thinks nothing of taking money from Walt's girlfriend for her share of the bill, and he still rejoices at the memory of getting his wife into the cinema for half price. With a heroic lack of vanity, Daniels refuses to soft-pedal the character, being as much of an arsehole at the end as he was at the beginning, yet Daniels makes him pitiable in his all-too-human loneliness.

The movie is about more than bad dads, however. It's about a young man's sentimental education, both in terms of learning how to forgive his parents and how to find a voice that might sound like his own. Walt, Baumbach's junior alter ego, has been force-fed challenging literature and cinema by his father, so he chooses music to make his mark at school assembly, passing off the Pink Floyd song "Hey You" as his own. (It's a number his father might have been expected to know but doesn't - perhaps he feels too grand to pontificate about rock music.) When his plagiarism is exposed, Walt blithely justifies it: "I felt I could have written it - so the fact that it was already written was kind of a technicality." It's reminiscent of a similar situation in Tobias Wolff's novel Old School, when the narrator copies a short story from another student and convinces himself that, because he could have written it, he somehow did.

Baumbach shot the movie in only 23 days, yet it proceeds with astonishing fluency and crispness. From the very first scene, a tense doubles match in which Bernard plays the competitive dad, you get the feeling of a film-maker who knows exactly what he's doing. He is very good, as Allen used to be, at listening to people talk, and at capturing tones of voice. When Walt hears of the separation and tells his mother, "I think you're doing a foolish, foolish thing", we hear a youth trying out the disapproving intonation of an adult. (But he oversteps the mark when he later calls her a "whore" out of loyalty to his father.)

A divorcing couple and their troubled kids is hardly a new idea for a film, yet it's precisely Baumbach's achievement that their travails carry such a charge of truthfulness. Tolstoy wrote that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, but the weariness and sense of failure that pours off the Berkmans will sadly be recognisable to many survivors of unhappy families; it is especially acute about the way children try to appease and negotiate with parents who would try to divide them.

While Daniels is the stand-out, Linney is a welcome counterweight as the fond, clear-sighted mother, desperate to protect her children even as she realises what damage has already been wrought. Eisenberg and Kline are also terrific as the brothers, their lives a tumult of confused loyalties and inchoate longings. (The little spasm of pain that crumples Frank's face when Bernard finally announces the separation is heartbreaking.)

Baumbach, who worked with Wes Anderson on the screenplay of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, has made a quantum jump here. He has entrusted this personal story to the right cast, and between them they have finessed one of the outstanding movies of the year.