New movies can sometimes disappear from theaters so quickly these days that it seems the releases are merely a tip of the hat to old-fashioned filmgoers, while the true doffing of the chapeau occurs when they start streaming. This is certainly the case with “The Innocent,” a new French movie that received a lowkey, perfunctory release before moving to the Criterion Channel. 

Nimble, heartfelt, and entertaining, the movie deserves a wider audience in the U.S. It’s not too far-fetched a statement to say a Hollywood remake likely is already in development.

The story begins in a prison: Convict Michel is rehearsing a scene while other prisoners, guards, and a middle-aged acting teacher, Sylvie, look on. By the end of the scene, viewers will note that Michel and Sylvie are in love. When, in the second scene, Sylvie tells her son Abel that she’s fallen for an inmate — while driving past a police van that’s taking Michel to an early-release hearing — the sense that we’re in for a fun ride despite the criminal quotient becomes clear.

The liveliness and slightly absurd aspect of the movie continues when we meet Clémence, the best friend of Abel’s late wife Maud, and she’s a firecracker. Tossing off sexually suggestive questions to Abel one second and in the next getting teary-eyed over Maud, she’s an even more unpredictable character than Michel or Sylvie. 

Once Michel gets released — it seems he was in for larceny — he and Sylvie decide to open a flower shop together. Abel, though, suspects Michel hasn’t gone completely straight and starts to follow him all over Lyon, where the movie is set. It turns out he’s right; Michel re-connects with some shady characters. 

He is also tipped off by a cohort that Abel is tailing him. After Michel confronts him and there’s some back-and-forth about protecting Sylvie, Abel decides to help him in an upcoming nefarious endeavor. This entails stealing a trailer filled with caviar, the profit from which is meant to help maintain the flower shop. 

Before Abel gets to this pivotal decision, though, humorous moments pop up everywhere, as in a scene in which Abel and Michel dance to salsa music, or when Michel asks Abel for sartorial advice. The movie is perceptive in its view of how, when marrying someone with adult children, one has to almost woo them as well. There are other, more droll touches, too, such as that Abel works at an aquarium and yet he’s agreed to participate in the theft of what is essentially fish eggs.

On paper, “The Innocent” may seem like a badly stitched together Hollywood pitch — a heist movie crossed with a family drama with a side seam of romantic comedy — yet writer/director/actor Louis Garrel, shepherding his fourth film, manages the movie’s genre strands deftly. While his growth as a director is evident, one wishes he had delved a bit more into the depressed character he himself plays, that of Abel. 

Still, his handling of the other actors is assured. As Sylvie and Michel, Anouk Grinberg and Roschdy Zem (recently seen in “Other People’s Children”) radiate a touching sweetness as a couple, and show the right amount of concern and exasperation in their interactions with Abel (and vice versa). And Noémie Merlant’s César-winning turn as Clémence truly demonstrates his instincts as a director. Mr. Garrel deploys her tentatively at first before unleashing her full potential in the movie’s final half-hour. She steals every scene she’s in.

A little more than 90 minutes long, “The Innocent” could have benefited from a bit more exploration of the four main characters, but its clever thematic entwining of acting, crime, and honesty in relationships sticks with viewers. 

This performative theme is no better illustrated than in a scene during the movie’s heist sequence: In a restaurant, Abel and Clémence must delay a driver from returning to his truck, and while they enact a tempestuous argument, the nature of their feelings for each other emerges. Anxious, heartbreaking, and not a little daft, it’s a scene to be remembered.