Director Noah Baumbach knows from divorce, and has made films that have illuminated sides of that subject throughout his career. His 2005 Squid and the Whale comes to mind, and the family in The Meyerowitz Stories (2017) is riddled with marital fragility, and resilience. Each hews close to the director’s family background. Baumbach’s new film, Marriage Story, seems most immediately to be informed by his own real-life divorce from Jennifer Jason Leigh in that we are looking at a couple of charming, good looking, articulate artists, with the superb actors Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson in the leads, but look again. The writing takes it somewhere else. At a press conference following a New York Film Festival screening this week, Baumbach claimed to want to tell a love story in a different way: “Sometimes you can see it more when it comes apart.”

That Baumbach is so good at portraying the love that brought the fictive Nicole and Charlie together is its secret ingredient. Tonally, emotionally, this film is no War of the Roses. And the cast, actors at their prime, attests to the writing’s truth. Seated beside him on the Walter Reade stage: Driver and Johansson, yes. And a dream team of lawyer types: Laura Dern and Ray Liotta, poised to go for the jugular, and one tired, ready to give up, Alan Alda. Especially grateful for Baumbach’s script, Alda exuded, “The way Noah wrote and directed this work, all you had to do was fit in with it.”

Renditions of songs from Sondheim’s Company, the first by Johansson’s Nicole with her mother (Julie Hagerty) and sister (Merritt Wever), the second by Adam Driver’s Charlie at a bar, are a surprise. Who knew he could sing? Music, laughs, and one resonant scene involving blood contribute to the film’s layers. Speaking about intensity, Baumbach thought he was hitting every genre, even a Hitchcockian thriller: you never know when the niceties, the civility will erupt. Of a fight scene—11 pages in the script: “the whole thing is a rhythm, very technical and very mapped out,” and by the end Driver is a ball of tears and Johansson is cutting his hair. As with much in life, Johansson pointed out, “A lot of sad things are hilarious.”