Perhaps every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, but the unhappier the Berkmans, the disintegrating foursome at the heart of The Squid and the Whale, become, the more familiar the movie seems. The divorce of two literary intellectuals, washed-up novelist Bernard (Jeff Daniels) and budding writer Joan (Laura Linney), would seem to be the stuff of small-press novels, or that New Yorker story you've been meaning to read for weeks. But if the Berkmans implicitly think themselves better, more enlightened, than the people around them, Squid quickly establishes that their troubles are all too common.

Squid, whose title comes from a much-feared diorama at New York's Museum of Natural History, was written and directed by Noah Baumbach, who based the movie on memories of his parents' divorce. (His father is novelist Jonathan Baumbach, and his mother, Georgia Brown, was a film critic for the Village Voice.) Baumbach, 16 at the time, is 35 now, and has just enough distance to transcend vindictive point-scoring while retaining a sharp, flavorful authenticity. Set in Brooklyn in 1986, the movie bypasses facile nostalgia in favor of minute, flawlessly chosen details: a Burger King glass on the dinner table; a copy of Pink Floyd's The Wall prized, and later plagiarized, by 16-year-old Walt (Jesse Eisenberg). Baumbach understands that period details are important only if they fix character as well as place: When Walt's dad drags him and a date to see Blue Velvet instead of Short Circuit, it's as if Walt's been yanked out of childhood and into adulthood, with no chance to get his bearings.

Even before the divorce, Walt and his 12-year-old brother Frank (Owen Kline) have chosen sides: The movie's first words, which Frank speaks on an indoor tennis court, are, "Me and mom versus you and dad." At one point, Frank and Walt don boxing gloves as they debate which parent to blame for the split, a play fight that ends with Walt throwing his brother to the floor. But the Berkmans' battles are more often verbal than physical, Bernard's vicious forehand notwithstanding. Squid's loose, hand-held shooting style belies its knife-edge precision, particularly where the use of language as an offensive weapon is concerned. When Bernard tells his children, apropos of a custody agreement that has them shuttling across Brooklyn every day of the week, "I love you, and I want to see you as much as your mom does," it sounds like a touching statement of paternal devotion, until you realize what he's really saying is, "I don't want your mom to have you more than I do." Once he's gotten his own place, a shabby temp dwelling five subway stops away, Bernard scolds Walt for referring to the house he grew up in as "home." The net effect is that Walt has not two homes, but none.

As a writer, particularly an unsuccessful and purposefully obscure one, Bernard tends to invest words with more meaning than they can bear. Favorite books are "dense," while actions he dislikes make people (namely, Joan) "difficult." More than his pedantic repetition of words like "coup" and "filet," it's Bernard's attempt to make simple words serve complex, private meanings that marks his failure to communicate. He calls Ivan (William Baldwin), the tennis pro to whom Frank has taken a shine, a "Philistine," he assuming the insult is self-evident. But when Frank asks him what a Philistine is, Bernard briefly stumbles, as if he'd never considered having to explain himself. "It's someone who doesn't like interesting films, or books and things," he ventures, a response less notable for its snobbery than its vagueness.

Idolizing his father, Walt decides his mother is leaving because Bernard's books don't sell. "You disgust me," he spits at her. "You weren't even a writer until recently." He parrots his father's criticisms (A Tale of Two Cities is "minor Dickens") and praises books he hasn't read to the heavens. With matter-of-fact disdain, he dismisses his pretty blond classmate Sophie (Halley Feiffer) when she strikes up a conversation about This Side of Paradise ("minor Fitzgerald," naturally). He suggests she read "The Metamorphosis" instead, Bernard having identified Kafka as "one of my predecessors." But when she does, and asks Walt what he thinks on their first quasi-date, the best he can come up with is that it's "very Kafkaesque."

At first, Walt's emulation of his father is played for laughs, but it grows more pathological as Bernard's behavior becomes more appalling. He lets a sexually forthright grad student (Anna Paquin) move into his house, and when Walt predictably develops a crush on her, advises him to "play the field" rather than stay true to Sophie. When Walt picks a fight with her and calls her "difficult," your heart breaks for fear he'll end up like his father.

The question by now is, what kind of woman would end up with such a man? Walt, having gone from wondering why his parents split up to why they were ever together, gets his mother talking about the effect Bernard's brash intellectualism had on her sheltered Midwestern mind. Bernard "wasn't like anyone," she recalls, a description we are unlikely to refute. But, perhaps inevitably, Joan and Frank never emerge as fully from the fog of memory as Bernard and Walt do. The lines on Linney's face hint at hurts we can only begin to suspect.

As Walt's anger towards his mother intensifies, Frank tries to take her side, but while Bernard is struggling with his newfound domestic responsibilities, she's wriggling free of hers. When Frank shows up at her house unannounced, she tells him in a sweet, maternal voice, "I need some nights without you guys sometimes." It's a tribute to Baumbach's even-handedness that you feel her need for space as keenly as the devastating effect her words have on a 12-year-old child.

The Squid and the Whale is the kind of movie that can as easily be killed by praise as inattention; its strength is in its understatement, although Baumbach isn't afraid of the occasional big moment (at least as big as you can manage on a shoestring budget). Daniels' performance is the movie's showiest, a monster in a career filled with mushballs, but it's Eisenberg's shell-shocked stare that makes Squid work; he lets you see the beginning of feelings that won't materialize for years to come. In a session with a child psychologist, Walt describes being so frightened by the titular exhibit that he "could only look at it with my hands in front of my face," a sensation of exquisite discomfort that viewers of The Squid and the Whale will experience many times over. But Baumbach gives us just enough remove to laugh at our own discomfort, to say nothing of the Berkmans'. As Walt recalls, when his mother told him about the exhibit later on, "It was still scary, but it was less scary, and it was fun to hear about it."

The Squid and the Whale Written and directed by Noah Baumbach A Samuel Goldwyn release Opens Friday at Ritz East recommended