Directed by the actor Steve Buscemi, from an autobiographical script by James C. Strouse, “Lonesome Jim” takes on a big subject and does a creditable job with it. Like its hero, it’s not quite sure where it is going, but, unlike him, it has a lot of fun getting there.

Jim (Casey Affleck) returns at age 27 to his hometown of Cromwell, Indiana, having failed to make it as a writer in New York. He seems even to have failed at dog walking, which is what he did to earn money while trying to write.

His father, Don (Seymour Cassell), is obviously less than overjoyed at the prospect of a grown son moving back into his home, not least because his older son, Tim (Kevin Corrigan), has already done the same. He orders Jim to go to work in the family’s factory making ladders.

But his wife and the boys’ mother, Sally (Mary Kay Place), welcomes Jim without conditions and is completely uncomplicated in her happiness at having her sons living at home with her. She ignores the musk of failure that clings to both of them, and, when Jim the prodigal returns, fusses over him excessively.

She even barges in on him when he is in the bathtub and calls him “her boy.” “I’m not a boy, mom,” Jim says wearily as he shields his private parts.

“Yes you are. You’re my boy. My pretty boy.”

At first it looks as if this smothering mother is connected to Jim’s depression, which at times renders him almost catatonic. The indifference, bordering on hostility, with which he greets her professions of love and affection somehow seems to make sense as the family sits around the heavily laden breakfast table and listens to Mercy’s “Love Can Make You Happy” on the easy-listening station.

The impression is furthered by the suicidal mood of brother Tim. “What did we do to make you kids so unhappy?” mom asks Jim.

“I don’t know,” he replies. “Maybe some people just shouldn’t be parents.”

Tim is an even bigger failure than Jim is. Jim couldn’t make it in New York; Tim couldn’t even make it in Cromwell. “I think about ending it all as it is,” says the younger to the older brother. “I can’t even imagine what it must be like to have your life” – that is, divorced with two daughters and a hostile ex-wife, rejected by the Cromwell police force, living with his parents and working for minimum wage. “I’m a f-up,” he adds, “but you’re a goddamn tragedy.”

Tim promptly goes out and wraps his car around a tree – not his first “accident,” though the only thing accidental about it, he later maintains, is that he lives, albeit with two broken legs.

But, refreshingly, mom turns out not to be the problem. On the contrary, her love for her “boys” is movingly direct and genuine, and we gradually come to value it, as does Jim himself, as the touchstone of goodness and decency in a world darkened by sadness.

It helps, too, that Jim has growing feelings for a divorced nurse, Anika (Liv Tyler), and her young son, Ben (Jack Rovello). Anika is as upbeat as Sally is. She likes to help people, she says, when Jim gets jealous after finding her visiting bedridden Tim.

Meanwhile, as far as Tim is concerned, the fact that Anika is sleeping with his brother must mean that “she has no standards. I bet she’d do it with me, too.”

The nastiness to which his self-loathing gives rise is echoed in Jim’s Uncle Stacy (Mark Boone Junior), who likes people to call him “Evil” and who also works at the ladder factory. Fat, hirsute, and utterly unprincipled, Uncle Evil lives up to his name, dealing drugs out of his trailer and blackmailing Jim when Sally gets sent to jail for his misdeeds.

And yet the movie is often laugh-out-loud funny. I enjoyed its exposure of the absurdity of despair, evident in the insane competition between the two brothers as to who is the more miserable. “I sort of came back to have a nervous breakdown,” Jim confesses to Anika, and then adds under his breath: “Bastard beat me to it.”

The only thing I didn’t like about “Lonesome Jim” is how Tim’s assessment of Anika is uncomfortably close to the truth. She likes to show off her tolerance for hard liquor and jumps into bed with Jim within moments of meeting him. Ben’s father is clearly a bum and so is Jim for most of the movie.Why does she put up with him?

I suspect that, having gone way out on a limb to give us a portrait of goodness in Jim’s mother, Mr. Strouse decided he’d better draw back from such saintly excess and humanize Jim’s girlfriend a bit – and that he didn’t know any other way to do it. But in the scheme of things, this is a small flaw and doesn’t prevent the movie from being well worth seeing.

“Lonesome Jim” shows the absurdity of despair – the despairing take themselves so seriously, mistaking their gloomy mental world for the whole world and their feelings for the whole world of feelings. And the only thing more absurd than someone’s taking himself too seriously is someone who doesn’t have a clue that that is what he is doing.

Tim falls into the latter category, but Jim gradually emerges from his room decorated with photos of the suicidal writers who are his heroes – Poe, Virginia Woolf, Hemingway, William Burroughs – into a degree of self-awareness and self-detachment, and remedies for both despair and absurdity.

When Anika pastes a big cut-out grin over the mouth of the giant but lugubrious Hemingway on Jim’s wall, it is in a way a refusal to be intimidated by the therapeutic culture’s tolerance for depressive solipsists, and it gives the picture a refreshing toughness that we don’t see enough of these days.

jbowman@nysun.com