A set of curly-toed juttis signify a couple’s overweening liberalism in Away We Go, a film by writer couple Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida and director Sam Mendes. Eggers and Mendes are doyens of dysfunction, but Away is more comic than dark. It’s less a movie than a series of comic setpieces which set up grotesque characters and then puncture them.

Away is about a couple esconced in a battered Volvo, searching for a city in which to settle down with their first baby on the way. John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph’s first choice is thwarted when Krasinski’s parents move to Belgium, renting out their home through ‘an elegant gentleman named Fareed.’ Jeff Daniels plays the callous dad, reprising his character from The Squid and the Whale.

The couple drive to Madison, where their friend U Wisconsin prof Maggie Gyllenhaal insists they take their shoes off. That’s how Krasinski ends up with a set of crazy-toes. They don’t last the evening; Gyllenhaal and her Burning Man-attending partner drive them away with bourgeois condescension and moonchild political correctness.

Krasinski is unbelievably good in this flick, whether taking revenge by driving Gyllenhaal’s son around in a forbidden stroller (’it’s the most fun you’ll have until you discover oral pleasure!’) or breaking into Tourette’s curses to drive up his unborn child’s heartbeat. He yells a non sequitur at his girlfriend, dives beneath the dashboard and reappears with a stethoscope, grinning like a be-spectacled, be-arded comic gargoyle.

The movie plays like a set of disjoint character sketches set in smaller cities like Phoenix, Madison and Montreal. The couple played by Krasinski and Rudolph are smug and hermetic, cocooned in co-dependency, uninterested in the world outside and convinced they’re the only couple who love each other. Krasinski’s tall, emo character is a particular kind of NPR listener’s dream, and everything about the flick, from the hand-lettered Juno font to the navel-gazing, is pitched at that demographic.

But Eggers and Vida hit heights of absurdism which make the movie well worth seeing. There’s this gem of a line in a scene of gloaming sadness after a friend’s miscarriage: ‘The babies keep growing and fading away. You don’t know whether to name ‘em or to bury ‘em.’ The final homecoming reminds me of the end of the Love in the Time of Cholera remake. Away We Go isn’t as significant a movie as it wants to be, but it’s consistently hilarious just the same.

The trailer: