Comedy 'Between the Temples' is a love story amidst a nervous breakdown

The most anxious comedy you’ll see this year, director Nathan Silver’s “Between the Temples” is a love story in the midst of a nervous breakdown. Except it feels like the movie itself is having the breakdown. Antsy, unexpectedly moving and often hysterical, the film stars Jason Schwartzman as Ben Gottlieb, a cantor at an upstate New York synagogue who has lost his voice. A little over a year ago, Ben’s alcoholic novelist wife died in a drunken accident, and ever since then, he’s been sitting quietly on the sidelines at services and seders, leaving the singing to Robert Smigel’s Rabbi Bruce, who insists he doesn’t mind. Don’t get me wrong, Ben can still talk — and as one would expect from a character played by Schwartzman, he talks a blue streak sometimes — but when Ben tries to sing, the words won’t come out. It’s as if the song in his heart has been lost.

Lucky for Ben, he happens to run into his old grade school music teacher, Carla Kessler O’Connor, played by comedy legend Carol Kane. She picks him up off the floor of a bar one night where Ben’s been knocked on his tuchus — our mourning cantor was mouthing off after drinking too many mudslides — and she puts him back together in more ways than one. Mrs. O’Connor, as the middle-aged schoolboy still dutifully refers to her, has decided she wants to have a bat mitzvah, better late than never, enrolling herself in one of Cantor Ben’s classes despite being 60 or so years older than the rest of his students. She’s a lonely widow we first see singing karaoke in the back of a bar all by herself, and the movie is about how these two grieving sad sacks will learn to make beautiful music together.

This is the ninth feature directed by the Cambridge-born Silver, and the first with famous movie stars and what looks to be a considerable budget. It feels fuller and more fleshed out than his previous pictures, which could sometimes feel like grab bags of ideas and improvisational exercises rather than complete stories unto themselves. His last film, 2018’s “The Great Pretender” followed a daisy chain of colleagues in a New York City theater troupe falling in and out of bed with each other, taking turns narrating the movie to wildly inconsistent effect. (Though I must admit giggling uncontrollably at the actor who could only get turned on when women were being rude to him. Reader, I felt seen.)

In addition to Schwartzman, Kane and the genius Smigel — revered by comedy-heads as the creator of “TV Funhouse” and Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog — the rest of the cast includes Caroline Aaron and “Triangle of Sadness” scene-stealer Dolly De Leon, as well as relative newcomer Madeline Weinstein as Rabbi Bruce’s recently dumped daughter, who seemingly every parental figure in the movie is trying to fix up with Cantor Ben. Silver is an expert at the everyone-talking-over-each-other school of cinema, whipping the scenes into swirling frenzies of semi-controlled chaos. The rat-a-tat dialogue was improvised by the actors from a 60-page outline penned by Silver and frequent collaborator C. Mason Wells, and when Schwartzman nervously describes one of his failed one-liners as “funny in a different way,” he could be talking about the film itself.

If you listen closely, you can hear echoes of “Harold and Maude,” hints of early Elaine May and conversational curlicues out of John Cassavetes country. “Between the Temples” was shot by the great cinematographer Sean Price Williams in grainy 16mm with no shortage of handheld snap zooms and other tricks from the 1970s cinematic playbook. Kane’s presence calls to mind Joan Micklin Silver’s “Hester Street” and other landmarks of that era, yet the movie never feels overly beholden to its retro influences the way something like “The Holdovers” did. It’s got a jagged, modern sensibility, the kind of movie where you find yourself laughing out loud at odd pauses and other things that aren’t necessarily jokes.

“Between the Temples” is twitchy and alive, edited with staccato musicality by John Magary in a manner that skips ahead of itself within scenes, constantly keeping the viewer on the back foot. Magary’s low-budget 2015 directorial debut “The Mend” was my favorite film from that year not named “Mad Max: Fury Road,” a blisteringly funny and endlessly innovative deconstruction of masculinity that was like the “Apocalypse Now” of two-brothers-arguing-in-an-apartment movies. I wish he’d direct another picture already, but until he does, we can marvel at this film’s inventive editing, which mucks with spatial and time conventions while weaving the digressive dialogue and off-kilter asides into a surprisingly cohesive whole. (Magary briefly appears as the bar patron who punches out Schwartzman. He’s billed as Muscular Blond Guy, despite being neither.)

It's a treat to see Carol Kane in a movie again, especially one so attuned to her loopy comic rhythms. The wild hair, saucer eyes and that inimitable voice make her a perfect foil for Schwartzman’s tightly-wound neurosis. I realized during “Between the Temples” just how much I’ve been taking Schwartzman for granted as a performer over the past 20-odd years, and how easily he slides into so many different auteurs’ toolkits while still doing (very recognizably) his own specific thing. He looks paunchier than usual in this picture, like the character has grown a layer of protective baby fat to try and insulate himself from his grief. There’s a nervy erotic encounter at a cemetery with Rabbi Bruce’s daughter that briefly pushes the movie into Philip Roth territory, where sex, death and shame are all intertwined. (The scene can’t help but call to mind Schwartzman’s role in Alex Ross Perry’s “Listen Up Philip,” still the best Philip Roth adaptation even though it isn’t based on a Philip Roth book.) But “Between the Temples” doesn’t stay that dark for very long.

The movie whizzes by in such a flurry of activity it’s only in retrospect one realizes how stock some of these situations and scenarios are. Stripped down to its synopsis, this is yet another Sundance movie about an unlikely friendship between two misfits who help each other heal, and I never thought I could sit through another variation on the “Uh-oh, we accidentally took drugs” scene, let alone be as amused as I was by the one in this picture. It’s the hyper-specific Jewish milieu and the peculiar comic aplomb that make the movie so memorable. It’s funny in a different way.

“Between the Temples” opens Friday, Aug. 23 at the Coolidge Corner Theatre and West Newton Cinema.