Rebecca (Julianne Moore) is a successful movie star preparing for her first Broadway play. Her husband Tom (David Duchovny), a former ad executive responsible for the “Got Milk?” slogan, is a stay at home dad doing his best to look after their two children. They should have the perfect life, but for varying reasons the couple is slowly drifting apart, their marriage in danger of collapsing in a sea of misdirected sarcasm and unintended anger.

Tobey (Billy Crudup) is Rebecca’s slacker younger brother who also happens to be Tom’s best friend. Curiously enough, he’s dating his sister’s closest confidant Elaine (Maggie Gyllenhaal). She’s an aspiring writer of children’s books whose maternal clock is starting to tick, and when Elaine really sits down to think about it she’s not at all sure Tobey is ready to make the commitment to be a good husband and father. Worse, she’s not even sure he wants to put forth the effort to try, and after seven years together the thought they might have all been wasted is almost too devastating to bear.

I absolutely adored writer-director Bart Freundlich’s “The Myth of Fingerprints” while his similarly dramatic “World Traveler” left me frustratingly cold. Now comes “Trust the Man,” and for the life of me I’m having a devil of a time deciding just exactly how it is I feel about the piece. While this melodramatic romantic comedy is certainly nowhere near as awful as the latter it’s also not remotely as good as the former, this movie an intriguing curio piece filled with near as many infuriating moments as it is exhilarating ones.

Certainly, to the filmmaker’s credit it is certainly easy to see why actors like Moore (who is also his wife) and Crudup seem so keen on working with him. Freundlich has an almost invisible touch where it comes to actors, allowing them acres of freedom to find the nuances and idiosyncrasies of their characters pretty much all on their lonesome. There is a free-flowing fluidity to the performances that can’t help but feel warm and authentic, the quartet at the center of this crafting beguiling and believable human portraits just screaming of reality.

Yet, at the same time so much of this picture’s narrative is disjointed and forced. At times the film has the aura of loosely connected vignettes, all of them strung together by strings so thin they disappear. Freundlich’s intentions telegraph themselves to an almost nauseating degree, subtle reminders of better films like Marco Tullio Giordana’s “The Best of Youth” hidden upon theater marquees behind saccharine VH1 montages of central characters walking merrily down the street. Worse he wastes a fine supporting cast, actors like Eva Mendes, James Le Gross and Ellen Barkin trapped playing characters that are almost too embarrassing for words.

But for every moment you sit in your chair and wonder what the heck the director was thinking (or why Gary Shandling’s lips look the same size as Anna Nicole Smith’s) there is a following scene that either makes you sit up in rapt attention or double over giddily in fits of boisterous laughter. While some of this treads far too close to sophomoric territory usually trolled by Edward Burns (“The Groomsmen”), I still couldn’t help but be moved by the dramatics slowly encircling Tom, Rebecca, Tobey and Elaine. There is a truth here, a pointed human angle that’s utterly refreshing, and a few too many poop jokes aside it’s difficult not to come away impressed.

If only the film ended better. Freundlich seriously botches the climax, everyone coming together in a series of absurdist clichés that it is only by the sheer good will generated by the actors’ earlier work I didn’t grab a fistful of popcorn and start throwing it at the screen. Yet this final really is horrendous, and the more I think about all the screeching musical cues (Clint Mansell’s score is downright insufferable), tired slow motion and frustratingly imbecilic speechifying the more I start to wonder what exactly I liked about the comedy-drama in the first place.

Best to just not think about it and be safely happy in my fond memories of that first two-thirds. Moore and Duchovny are exquisite while both Gyllenhaal and (especially) Crudup charmed the shoes right off of my feet. While I’m certainly not about to put all my faith in it, “Trust the Man” has just enough pluck to at least make me smile. For all its faults, who am I to come down hard on a picture that forces me to do that?