My wife proposes that You Hurt My Feelings is set in the same gently charmed universe as Frances Ha, and she has a point.

Frances, with her collapsing dreams and her struggle to piece together a viable future, goes through an immensely shaky time in her life and comes out the other side with a new sense of stability: she earns her happy ending, but she also lives in world where that matters, where there’s enough openness and generosity to accommodate how she grows up in fits and starts. And when one dream passes her by, there’s still another that she can choose. Her eventual artistic fulfillment and relationships may not be as glamorous as she once imagined, but they’re real, and they have worth. Frances Ha makes me feel better about life.

So, too, does Nicole Holofcener’s You Hurt My Feelings, which applies that same vision to characters who, in their various low-key midlife crises, are seeing their long-settled lives start to fray and even unravel. The couple at the heart of the story is Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and Don (Tobias Menzies), whose relationship feels both genuinely romantic and appropriately lived-in. Don is a therapist who hasn’t been at his best lately–he’s mixing up clients’ histories, and his advice rings hollow. He’s worried about the lines around his eyes. Beth teaches a small creative writing class–one where actual talent is more surprising than commonplace–and has been working on the novel that will follow her middle-of-the-charts memoir. She’s on the mumble-mumbleth draft of this book, and she can’t stop worrying about it. Her agent thinks it needs a major overhaul. Don, who has faithfully read every iteration thus far, assures her that it’s good–why doesn’t she try contacting that other agent, the one who was so enthusiastic about her memoir?

Then one day, Beth is with her sister, interior designer Sarah (Michaela Watkins), while Don is off sock-shopping with Sarah’s husband, struggling actor Mark (Arian Moayed). Beth and Sarah decide to surprise the guys–only to wind up overhearing Don confessing that he doesn’t really like Beth’s novel.

He doesn’t know what to do about it, he tells Mark. He usually likes her work. But this isn’t clicking for him, and while maybe he could have said something when she gave him the first draft, he can’t suddenly tell her the truth now.

You Hurt My Feelings tackles the idea of the little white lie and admits, reasonably enough, that there’s no sure answer to it and no universal rule. Sometimes harsher takes on someone’s work feel pointless and cruel, and it’s hard to be honest about a creative misfire when you know the artist will take that assessment personally. (Beth, for example, has a hard time feeling like Don can really love her if he doesn’t love her work.) And hey, who said your taste is so great anyway? But at the same time, unwavering positivity can be jarringly dissonant and keep people from forming a better sense of what direction to head in and how to help themselves. Everyone is making it up as they go along, judgment call by judgment call.

While that’s the film’s central concern, it also deftly deals with its characters’ professional insecurities–including about whether or not they’re in the right profession at all, and whether they should try to buckle down and do better or simply walk away–and the complexities of family love. If these kinds of ordinary, universal problems aren’t always solvable, it’s heartening that the movie suggests that they are, at least, survivable.

All of that aside, You Hurt My Feelings is often just a delightful hangout movie. Louis-Dreyfus and Menzies make an instantly convincing, funny, and lovable couple; likewise for Watkins and Moayed. It’s a pleasure to spend time with them. I’m especially fond of the moment where Beth and Don’s problems come to a head during poor Mark’s birthday dinner–on the day he was fired, no less–and he awkwardly seeks to change the subject to something, anything else: “This is a Greek olive oil.” Beth’s writing classes and Don’s therapy sessions are also great, with David Cross and Amber Tamblyn being particularly welcome as an obsessively feuding married couple who can agree on only one thing: Don isn’t giving them good value for their money.

This is a casual, small-scale movie that cares a lot about its characters, is maybe a little too nice to them–but charmingly so–and doesn’t forget to make a few jokes. It’s not the kind of heavy0handed film that ever gets formally classed as “feel-good,” but it does, in fact, make me feel good. It’s nice to have an illustration of how we continuously go on constructing our lives and choosing how to live in them.

You Hurt My Feelings is streaming on Showtime.