There's a lot to talk with Noah Baumbach about: the obvious resemblance between his new movie, The Squid and the Whale, and the real-life divorce of his parents, novelist Jonathan Baumbach and Village Voice film critic Georgia Brown; how it feels for Baumbach to be getting the best reviews of his career before the movie's even been released; even his recent marriage to Jennifer Jason Leigh. But I have to ask about the Burger King glass.

Nestled among Squid's sparse but pitch-perfect evocation of Baumbach's 1986 adolescence, The Glass crystallizes everything the movie gets right. Its unassuming presence in an otherwise timeless dinner scene subtly fixes the time frame, and its proximity to 16-year-old Walt (Jesse Eisenberg), Baumbach's stand-in, is a reminder of the childhood he will soon be forced to leave behind — all without a closeup or cut-in. It's there if you want to discover it.

Although Squid was shot in a few weeks on a tiny budget, Baumbach took great care with the details, some so tiny and personal you'd never know their significance if he didn't explain it. As Bernard, the character based on Baumbach's father, Jeff Daniels wears clothing passed down from his real-life progenitor, while the Park Slope brownstone belonging to the movie's Berkmans is stocked with books that were once the Baumbachs'.

Over coffee a few blocks from his apartment, Baumbach dispels the notion that he was out to replicate his own life. The books and his father's clothes, he says, were "not to literally recreate it, but to help me connect to it emotionally." He recalls how François Truffaut, an obvious influence on Squid's style, burned his own favorite books in Fahrenheit 451, despite the fact that the audience would never see their titles. "Besides," Baumbach says, "I like how books look."

Although it's not a Baumbach heirloom, The Glass turns out to have its own history. "I always remembered that my mom was nervous about us drinking from Burger King glasses, because she had heard that the paint was coming off in kids' mouths," he recalls. "It's about wanting things that mean something to me — and that are right for the movie and the characters. I just love that thing about families: You have all these different things in the cupboards, but somehow those Burger King glasses make it through every year. They're even over at Bernard's. I like the idea that he got some Burger King glasses in the divorce."

Since the movie premiered at Sundance in January, Baumbach has gotten used to, and a bit weary of, answering questions about its basis in fact. "The movie is intended to be a direct, intimate experience for the viewer, but it isn't for me," he says. "The movie to me is a buffer. It's protection." The resonances with his real life are many: The Berkmans' alternate-day custody agreement was Baumbach's as well, and the five subway stops between their houses are the route he and his brother traveled every day. But there are personal moments in The Squid and the Whale that have nothing to do reality. Baumbach says that when Walt, eager to please his demanding parents, passes off Pink Floyd's "Hey You" as an original composition, "it feels like a confession, even though I didn't do it."

Although Squid is Baumbach's most overtly personal movie, it's also, he points out, the first time he's written about characters who weren't roughly his age; the leads in Kicking and Screaming, Mr. Jealousy and the disowned Highball travel the years between mid and late 20s at the same rate as their creator. "A lot is made of this movie being so autobiographical, but in a way I almost had more freedom to invent," he says. "I'm writing from the perspective of parents, who I wasn't, and kids that I was 15 to 20 years ago. I tried to create a familiar environment that would put me in the mind-set of that time, but in a way it really allowed me the freedom to extrapolate. So many of the central things in the movie are not things that happened."

Mirroring the crisis on screen, Squid is a product of a recent period of self-doubt, a five-year dry spell Baumbach filled writing TV pilots and co-scripting The Life Aquatic with his friend Wes Anderson. "I always thought I'd be a certain kind of filmmaker, have a certain success," he says, but around his 30th birthday, he realized, "I wasn't where I thought I'd be." In a sense, he says, the "less serious" writing for TV loosened him up, allowing Squid's narrative to flow forth largely unchecked. Ironically, setting aside his preoccupations with success has resulted in what is likely to be Baumbach's most successful movie to date, and certainly the one he's most satisfied with. "It's the movie I always wanted to make," Baumbach says. "I just didn't know it at the time."