Between the Temples review – bittersweet screwball comedy with shades of Harold and Maude

Voices – the loss of them, the way they can be trampled and flattened by people who feel they know best – are at the heart of Nathan Silver’s abrasively heartfelt comedy drama Between the Temples, an idiosyncratic and bittersweet American indie set in upstate New York. Benjamin Gottlieb (Jason Schwartzman) has lost his voice, or at least the ability to sing. And this is a problem: fortysomething Ben is a cantor; he chants the prayers and passages from the Torah to the congregation in an inclusive, liberal reform synagogue. The loss of his voice cuts deep into his identity, a physical manifestation of a looming crisis of faith triggered by the death of his wife the previous year.

And then there’s the voice of Carol Kane, Schwartzman’s co-lead in this odd-couple story – Harold and Maude is an obvious reference – that finds comfort in the unexpected connection between two slightly broken people. There has always been a singular and immediately distinctive quality to Kane’s speaking voice; it’s light and high – so comically squeaky at times you could imagine it coming from the mouth of one of the wild-haired felt gonks in the cast of Sesame Street. But there’s also a frazzled, friable element to her delivery – the breathy way her sentences start to crumble before they are fully complete – that brings fragility and vulnerability and gives depth to the quirkiness.

There’s no doubt that she has a gift for comedy – roles in everything from Taxi (she played Simka, the wife of Andy Kaufman’s character Latka) to The Princess Bride to Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt attest to her impeccable timing and deliciously offbeat instincts. But the complexity and the layers of partially healed emotional scars that underpin her sunny, goofy performance in Between the Temples make this a career-best contender for the 72-year-old actor.

Kane plays Carla, Ben’s retired former primary school music teacher. They meet shortly after he hits rock bottom in a bar on a Saturday night, picking a fight after consuming a few too many chocolate-flavoured cocktails. He is laid out by a single punch. And that’s when Carla swoops in, scooping him up, icing his eye and buying him a real drink. They don’t recognise each other at first. Why would they? Thirty years have passed and little Benny’s most distinctive characteristic, his wide-open smile, has long been missing in action.

But then the gears of Ben’s memory click and he places her as the teacher who inspired and encouraged him in a distant moment in his life before grief turned everything grey, and the suffocating concern of his lesbian mothers (Dolly de Leon and Caroline Aaron) weighed down on him. The weight of melancholy is real, incidentally, and captured by Schwartzman’s expressive physicality; his shoulders are hunched under the burden, everything about him is bent and rounded. He looks like a guinea pig wrestling with existential despair.

The kindness of his former teacher touches Ben, but he promptly sinks back into his sadness. Then Carla turns up at his synagogue, fluttering into the room where he prepares a class of undermotivated 12-year-olds for their barmitzvahs and batmitzvahs. She wants what she was denied as a child – the opportunity to belatedly study for her own batmitzvah, with Ben as her chosen teacher. Reluctantly at first, he takes on the task. And to his surprise, he bonds with Carla over music, Hebrew study and hallucinogenic mushroom tea. He finds a release in the barely controlled chaos of her life.

It’s the kind of story that could, in the wrong hands, be insufferably twee and whimsical. But Silver, who has enjoyed moderate festival success with films such as Thirst Street, Uncertain Terms and Soft in the Head, brings a spiky, erratic and bracingly angular tone to the story. Shot in a wintry palette on 16mm film by a typically unpredictable and lurching Sean Price Williams (best known for the agitated, caffeinated energy of his camerawork for the Safdie brothers), this is film-making that has its roots in the oddball fringes of American auteur cinema of the 70s. Like Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, Between the Temples contains several self-consciously retro wipe edits. It’s a cheesy throwback technique that has fallen so far out of fashion it seems almost radical and transgressive to today’s eyes. And the music choices, which include several Hebrew-language rock and pop tracks from the 70s, also evoke an earlier era.

There are other, more contemporary references, however. The film’s most poignant and tragicomic device – a phone voicemail filled with 762 messages from Ben’s late wife – places the story firmly in the present day. And a brilliantly uncomfortable, squirm-inducing Friday night dinner scene made me think of the now fabled Christmas dinner episode of The Bear. Ultimately, however, for all its sandpaper approach to raw emotion, Between the Temples ends with a message of hope. It’s about reconnecting with life, love and faith; about accepting that happiness might be found where you least expect it.

• In UK and Irish cinemas