Pay too much attention to the title of Noah Baumbach’s new film and you might mistake Roger Greenberg, played by an uncharacteristically quiet Ben Stiller, for the protagonist. Don’t worry if you do – perpetually self-obsessed, he thinks it’s all about him too.

From the start, the film prepares us to forgive his idiosyncrasies. We learn from his brother that Roger is recuperating from a mental breakdown which saw him hospitalized. But when the depressed 40-year-old man appears on the scene, compassion is squashed by his total lack of likeability. Every time we think he is about to look outside himself, he reverts to negative, fearful, introspective type.

This is where he becomes problematic as a character. It is admirable that the writers refuse to give him redeeming qualities. Sometimes, people don’t change, they don’t give reasonable explanations and they don’t find meaningful ends to our stories. As a result, we don’t always like them. So, by all means, make Roger Greenberg as irritating as you like, but what is truly troubling is that he is not interesting.

He is reduced to parody and that’s not necessarily his mental fragility speaking. All the characters from his past carefully keep their distance from him. His former band mates still resent him for crushing their dreams by refusing to sign a record deal because of his anti-corporate ideals. His ex-girlfriend, played by co-writer Jennifer Jason Leigh, does not share his affectionate memories of their relationship. We don’t get any indication that he was someone you’d like before the breakdown.

And because he is so predictable, we quickly give up on asking why he persistently writes letters of complaint to airlines and pet taxi services. We don’t wonder why he shoves his face in Florence’s fanny one moment and recoils rudely from what he thinks is a cold sore on her lip the next. We expect him to continue talking about his brother’s sick dog when his ex-girlfriend mentions that her mother is ill. Since any change he undergoes throughout the film is minor, if existent at all, there is no drive to know more about him.

The characters around him are infinitely more knowable and likeable. Rhys Ifrans plays Ivan, the friend that gently gives and gives of himself to Roger with no indication of reciprocation. Forced to abandon music, he works in IT and is undergoing a trial separation with his wife. But he makes no great claims on life. He quietly accepts things as they are.

And then there is 25-year-old Florence, a fantastic performance by Greta Gerwig, who, incredibly, seems attracted to Roger out of sympathy. On the surface she appears to be a pushover, awkwardly lending him her body (when they do eventually have sex, it is excruciatingly unsexy) and absorbing his insults without retaliation. When she asks him if he could love her, we want to scream at the screen, “Of course not!” as her friend Gina would probably do.

But Ivan and Florence are both far more complex than they seem at face value. In throw-away comments like, “I must stop doing things just because they feel good” Florence shows that her sexual encounter with Roger is not something she has simply allowed to happen. Her passions exist even if they lack expression.

Ivan and Florence are characters that have learned to process their disappointment with life. She may be younger but she is disappointed all the same, which is why she tells Roger she admires him for choosing to “do nothing”.

Ivan processes disappointment by working to salvage what he has. Florence does the same by trying her hand at everything without too much introspection. And Roger Greenberg’s inability to relate to others is rooted in his failure to process his own disappointment, which makes his story depressingly hilarious.

Adele Jarrett-Kerr

Get Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale from Amazon for £3.97 or from Play.com for £5.99 (free delivery)