“Marty” for slackers. “Punch-Drunk Love” on hashish. “Dinner With Friends” without the dinner and potentially without the friends.

On its surface, “Jack Goes Boating” resembles any number of urban romances. But Bob Glaudini’s comic drama — produced by the dependably vibrant LAByrinth Theater Company and starring the company’s co-artistic directors, Philip Seymour Hoffman and John Ortiz — carves out its own astringent yet curiously endearing identity, one that gives voice to the hesitations and hopes of people who frequently go unnoticed.

It’s winter in New York — a hectic time of year for the shambling, maladroit title character Jack (Mr. Hoffman) and his more presentable friend Clyde (Mr. Ortiz), who both work as drivers for the limousine service owned by Jack’s uncle. Clyde lives in a modest but tasteful one-bedroom apartment with his wife, Lucy (Daphne Rubin-Vega); Jack is still cooped up in his uncle’s basement, with little to divert him beyond a reggae song he plays incessantly on a beat-up Walkman for its “positive vibe.”

Lucy, a telemarketer for a slimy grief-seminar salesman, and Clyde have set Jack up with her new co-worker, a comparably fragile woman named Connie (Beth Cole). Their romance, with its tentative but encouraging half-steps forward, nudges Jack to shake off his pot-induced stupor and do things he’s never done before: cook dinner for a woman, for one thing, and learn to swim. The latter goal, along with the play’s title, stems from Connie’s suggestion of an ideal date:

CONNIE: I look forward to when winter’s over.
JACK: Go boating, maybe, like we talked about. I mean, unless you don’t want to.
CONNIE: I’d like to go with you. JACK: It’s not summer for a while.
CONNIE: It seems forever.
JACK: Yeah.
CONNIE: When you want something.

Clyde has traditionally served as Jack’s guru as much as his friend, and he endeavors to teach Jack the crawl stroke at a public pool. (These lessons are conveyed memorably through David Korins’s irresistible set design and Japhy Weideman’s clever lighting.) He also helps out on the cooking front, introducing Jack to a pastry chef who once had a fling with Lucy. These “favors” come with emotional strings attached, though, and culminate in a fraught dinner party that Jack throws for the other three characters. Will Jack learn to swim/cook/love? Or will Clyde’s and Lucy’s own, less overt neuroses eighty-six the burgeoning romance?

From Jack and Connie’s awkward initial meeting to a squirmy but sweet depiction of what used to be called heavy petting, Mr. Glaudini limns a believably off-kilter romance between two damaged adults. “You’ve never been in a relationship for any length of time,” Lucy warns Jack. “A lot happens. A lot of good things. A lot of things you wouldn’t wish on your enemy.” A restrained, thick-tongued Mr. Hoffman makes it clear both how much Jack desires this sort of experience and how ill equipped he may be to handle it.

Mr. Glaudini also has a sharp ear for the combative intimacies between male friends — not the usual hostile oneupsmanship but the mix of condescension and tenderness between two people with different expectations of life. He and director Peter DuBois bustle from home to workplace and back, never slowing down to answer the nagging but ultimately unnecessary questions that bog down so many plays. (Is something wrong with Jack mentally? Are the perceived threats that fuel Connie’s inhibitions real or imagined? And how on earth did these two guys become pals in the first place?)

LAByrinth has been responsible for some thrilling examples of bare-knuckled realism, particularly in its works by Stephen Adly Guirgis — works directed by Mr. Hoffman, incidentally — but it also has a propensity for lapsing into actor-driven indulgence. Stretches of the company’s works have felt more like extended scene study classes than like anything being mounted for the benefit of an audience. (Mr. Guirgis’s plays, for all their visceral bravura, are not immune to this tendency.)

Messrs. Glaudini and DuBois avoid this sort of grandstanding for nearly all of “Jack Goes Boating.” Not that the characters don’t experience heightened emotions, but the sturm und drang almost always exists in service of the story. This discipline, however, vanishes for long stretches of the disastrous dinner party. I lost count of the number of controlled substances ingested in lieu of food — I suspect the four characters did as well — and Mr. Glaudini allows the ensuing bleary-eyed intensity fest to hijack the narrative and force his less interesting plot points into the foreground.

If any character would be susceptible to this, it would be the stunted Jack. But Mr. Hoffman brings a lived-in integrity to this stammering man-child, refusing to endow him with any qualities beyond those found in your average nice guy. Mr. DuBois has created a lovely image of Jack sitting alongside a tiny stuffed koala — a get-well gift — in a hospital waiting room; Mr. Hoffman, stuffed into a bulky winter coat and an everpresent wool hat, looks both enormous and tiny at the same time. He is well matched by Ms. Cole, who similarly keeps Connie’s failings from becoming adorable or even necessarily sympathetic. Mr. Ortiz and the incisive Ms. Rubin-Vega are completely plausible as a husband and wife settling warily into the compromises that punctuate a shared life.

“Jack Goes Boating,” with its odd pacing and its overemphasized metaphors, rarely hits the adrenaline-rush highs of some other LAByrinth productions. But when it keeps its wits about it, it offers an admirably unvarnished glimpse at the difficulties as well as the rewards of immersion into life, whether at a public swimming pool or in bed with a frightened new girlfriend. Mr. Glaudini even breaks ranks from his downtown theater brethren and offers his flawed but decent protagonists a happy ending. Positive vibes come in many different packages.

Until April 29 (425 Lafayette St. at Astor Place, 212-967-7555).