Bill Hader, Kristin Wiig make 'Skeleton Twins'

One song kept playing through my mind as I watched “The Skeleton Twins,” an introspective indie drama starring the very exciting post-”Saturday Night Live” Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader as siblings damaged by their father’s death.

“Suicide Is Painless,” the Johnny Mandel classic that was “MASH’s” indelible and ironic musical anchor, is very much the sensibility that director Craig Johnson confers on his film - emotionally authentic, atypical in the way it looks at suicide and its ripple effects. “It brings on many changes ... .”

Deftly weaving humor and sweetness in with the pathos, Johnson and Mark Heyman’s screenplay won the coveted Waldo Salt screenwriting award at the Sundance Film Festival in January.

But it is what Hader and Wiig do with the words that make this one of the better movies to come along this year. The pair, who specialized in over-the-top nonsense on “SNL,” till the terrifying terrain of adults who lost their father to suicide when they were young with such eloquent grace that it speaks volumes about the depth of their talent.

It would be a loss if comedy were to lose them entirely, but “The Skeleton Twins” makes you glad they’re taking on life’s weightier issues too.

For Johnson, it’s an impressive step up from his first feature, “True Adolescents” (2009)

“Skeleton Twins” is all grown up, though Maggie (Wiig) and Milo (Hader) are definitely cases of arrested development, their emotional growth stunted by Dad’s death in vastly different ways.

As the film opens, they are both contemplating their own methods of acting out that lethal legacy. It’s a provocative way to establish the point that the twins have been floundering in life for a long time. Milo comes closer to succeeding at ending it all. His inability to cope with his downward spiral as a failing actor in Los Angeles puts him in the hospital. The call from the nurse means the handful of pills Maggie has will go back in the bottle for now.

The crisis serves to reconnect them after a decades-long estrangement.

Maggie’s invitation for Milo to come live with her for a while sets in motion the film’s examination of the complexities of siblings’ affection for and disaffection with each other. This is as central to the film as the idea of suicide. Wiig’s ability to let sorrow settle into her eyes and, like a tear, just hang there, gets a workout here. Hader’s gift of mood-shifting, flipping through emotions like pages of a book he barely finds interesting, carries one scene after another.

Twins are bound more tightly than most siblings, and time and again Johnson uses that bond to break down the idea of living versus not, loving versus not. The question is whether, like the Mandel song, Milo and Maggie can “take or leave” suicide as they please. “The Skeleton Twins” answers it beautifully.