‘Together Together’: Paternal Instincts

So much. Written and directed by Nikole Beckwith (“Stockholm, Pennsylvania”), the largely two-character comedy is about the byzantine world of au courant reproduction, the commercial exploitation of the pregnant and, mostly, personalities in conflict. “Together Together” might be about surrogacy, but not all of its surrogates are gestational. Many are proxies in the audience’s war with Matt, the kind of officious know-it-all whom people generally cross the street to avoid. Or ghost online. Or divorce.

Matt isn’t divorced, but single after a long-term relationship and wants a baby. Anna just wants to go to graduate school and can do it on what Matt is paying her to carry his donor-egg baby and then walk away. She wants to walk away. She makes it clear from the start. What he makes clear, in not so many words, is that he’s going to try to dragoon her into a nurturing relationship whether she wants to be nurtured or not.

Mr. Helms, who came to prominence as a correspondent on “The Daily Show,” seems to play a similar kind of role each time out. Either that, or he makes each role conform to his groove, which is likable without being lovable. Ms. Harrison (“Shrill”) is a lesser-known quantity, but she makes Matt the foil for her dry delivery of Anna’s polite resistance to all his enthusiasms, and her growing impatience. She should have seen it coming, of course: Her “job” interview is somewhere between a therapy session and a deposition. (“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done? Have you ever stolen anything?”) When Matt, reading off her questionnaire, asks the age of Anna’s child, she hesitates: She got pregnant in high school and the baby was adopted immediately. Matt is sensitive, to the point that he gives sensitive guys a bad name. But he also seems dumb enough to think that if Anna has already given up one baby, giving up a second won’t be so hard.

They don’t directly talk about it. We certainly think about it. And do so for the rest of the movie.

Smartly, Ms. Beckwith has surrounded her low-wattage lead characters with a supporting cast that sparks. In addition to Tig Notaro, Fred Melamed, Nora Dunn and Rosalind Chao, there’s Sufe Bradshaw, as the medical tech who gets a monthly window into the Anna-Matt psychodrama and responds with mutely eloquent dismay. Anna Konkle is Shayleen, the host at the Koala House Birth Center for Learning and Feeling. (Anna can barely keep a straight face. Neither can we.) Most memorable is Julio Torres as Jules, Anna’s co-worker at their coffee shop, where Matt delivers her “pregnancy tea” and a pair of clogs. “Ew, whose clogs?” Jules asks, appalled. Need he say more?

Matt could say less, but he is written by Ms. Beckwith in an understatedly moving way: His main source of income seems to come from an app he developed called Loner: Like Tinder, you can scroll through pictures of people, and save them, but you don’t actually make contact with anyone. For her part Anna is a slow-rolling heartbreak: Still wounded by the way her family turned away from her when she got pregnant the first time, she tells Matt she really doesn’t miss the family she left behind. “I miss the family I had when I was 10,” she says. And if that’s not the saddest line ever, it comes pretty close.

—Mr. Anderson is a Journal TV critic. Joe Morgenstern is on vacation.