Baumbach says Ha – If you kind of, sort of, like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rjz6tKEkCPA” target=”_blank”>Girls, then you’ll enjoy Frances Ha.

In theaters Friday: Man of Steel, This is the End

New on Blu-ray: Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, How to Survive a Plague, Oz the Great and Powerful

If you kind of, sort of, like Girls, but always wished it were actually, well, good, then you’ll enjoy Frances Ha. Noah Baumbach’s New York-set relationship comedy is, if little else, a sweet confection of moments. Charming, wistful, honest, misguided and heartbreaking moments. Those who see it will argue over what those moments add up to, but regardless, it’s hilarious and the most enjoyable film to be found in Baumbach’s largely overrated body of work.

Shot in Woody Allen’s stark Manhattan style and following an unmotivated dancer blithely treading water in a city of breakneck hustlers while loving/hating her best gal pal, the film feels more like a 1980s fantasia than the cinema verite modern documentary “statement about 2013” I suspect the director may have intended.

This happy accident is not necessarily a bad thing, though. It echoes back to Baumbach’s only other truly successful piece, 2005’s Wes Anderson-produced The Squid and the Whale, a semi-autobiographical film actually set in the 1980s. Frances Ha feels moored in the Reagan era as well, and that tone coupled with a loveable lead performance amps up the whole mumblecore/Girls-pastiche vibe into something more substantively engaging.

Star and co-writer Greta Gerwig (Greenberg, Lola Versus) makes for a sensational everyone—no small feet for a New Yorker whose idea of poor is not being able to afford living in Tribeca. But what could have been an artist’s insufferable cipher is instead a Charlie Brown who has to find the guts to go for broke with her creative career. Maybe it is Gerwig’s ever-animated face—pretty but not gorgeous—or her performance—painstakingly cute but not aggressively so—but she makes Frances, for all of her faults, extremely likeable. Her realization that best friend Sophie is aging and evolving, too, that her friend is her friend and not her family, is a hurdle of early adulthood we all have to face.

Baumbach knows his way around a soundtrack that exhilarates his images, plucking tunes from Dean & Britta—who also, bizarrely, cameo—David Bowie, T-Rex, and the most obscure Paul McCartney track imaginable. But despite some clever, quick-cut editing that creates tasty vignettes of life in the city, the director still has third act problems. Big ones.

Warning: Spoilers below.

After hitting rock bottom taking an entry-level job at her old college, there is no real justification for Frances’ responsible and fortuitous about-face for the finale. Her return to the city and arrival as a dance choreographer with her own troupe appears to have been a Manhattan miracle. If the director is trying to tell audiences and artists to just stick with your passions and you’ll achieve your dreams, he forgot that little part about all the hard work that goes into it. Didn’t he see Black Swan? Of course, he may not have done a lot of the heavy lifting on what is ultimately a flawed, but worthwhile comedy. It seems Gerwig has done all of that for him.