'Overnight’ more than just a sex comedy

There’s a jangly, good-natured looseness to “The Overnight” that provides a welcome tonic to the strident summer blockbusters surrounding it. A modest, reed-thin slice of contemporary Los Angeles life, this often ribald, ultimately thoughtful comedy of social and sexual manners may not aim particularly high, but it hits a singular mark nonetheless.

That target, put simply, is the G-spot where raunchy, R-rated comedy overlaps with deeper observations about relationships, self-acceptance and identity. As “The Overnight” opens, Alex (Adam Scott) and his wife, Emily (Taylor Schilling), are enjoying an intimate moment in bed (although with the incessant chatter and “a little more to the left” stage direction, “enjoy” may be a relative term).

Alex and Emily’s encounter ends in coitus interruptus, which will turn out to be a powerful motif in “The Overnight.” It seems that Alex, Emily and their young son, RJ (R.J. Hermes), are new in town, eager to make friends but warily anxious as well.

Later at the playground, RJ befriends the son of Kurt (Jason Schwartzman), who immediately regales Alex with tales of vegan diets and cleanses before admitting that he’s making a joke.

With his trying-too-hard-not-to-try-too-hard hat and studiously of-the-moment shades, Kurt epitomizes artisanal hipster cool, and when Alex and Emily stop by for dinner later, they realize that he’s not only impossibly wealthy, but also married to a beautiful French model-actress named Charlotte (Judith Godrèche).

The two couples and their children fall into an easy, instantaneous friendship, a process “The Overnight” chronicles through free-flowing Bordeaux, bong hits and escalating boundary violations.

Playing out over the course of one night and the wee hours of the following morning, “The Overnight” ostensibly is about the uptight Alex and Emily loosening up around the far more bohemian Kurt and Charlotte, who guilelessly show their new pals the breast-feeding videos Charlotte stars in as well as Kurt’s paintings of the most private parts of private parts.

Harking back to “Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice,” “The Overnight” joins a long line of nervous sex comedies, and the sense of chaos grows more palpably kinky until the film’s billboard scene, when Alex and Kurt perform an impromptu Magic Mike routine, complete with boom box. A comically broad, physically bold jape of Farrelly brothers proportions, it’s clearly meant to be the film’s big reveal.

But it’s also fraught with subtexts - about inadequacy, gender roles, the emotional rules of male friendship and class competition - that elevate what could have been a simplistically crude sight gag into something more sensitive and alert.

Written and directed by Patrick Brice (“Creep”), “The Overnight” was produced by Mark and Jay Duplass, with whose HBO series “Togetherness” the movie shares some married-with-difficulties DNA. Fans of Noah Baumbach’s “While We’re Young” will also recognize Brice’s note-perfect rendering of prosperity and cultural superiority, which are signaled with carefully cultivated, seemingly casual precision by those who possess them.

In “The Overnight,” it’s Kurt and Charlotte who might describe themselves as “#blessed.” They’re portrayed with keen self-awareness and deceptive physical courage, especially by Schwartzman. He and Scott - who brings such focus and solemnity to even the silliest gambits - gradually take over the movie, until, in a startlingly somber penultimate scene, they become the film’s most compelling couple. In a way, “The Overnight” ends just as it’s beginning.

But for a brief time, even in the midst of preposterous digressions and full (and not so full) Montys, it offers a compassionate glimpse of people at their most naked, honest and undefended.