Bob Odenkirk’s directorial debut, “Melvin Goes To Dinner”, is a no-budget film as stylized and well-crafted as most bigger comedies. The talking heads comedy could easily have been a self-indulgent pet project for Odenkirk, but the film takes itself seriously in a way that few indie comedies do.

For one thing, Odenkirk actually directed the film. This isn’t one of those flat indie pieces where a static camera captures a bunch of friends performing under-rehearsed tableaux in living rooms and all-night diners. Odenkirk clearly put in the time setting up shots, carefully choosing dissolves, and editing the scenes to energize the narrative. Godard it ain’t, but a big part of the movie’s appeal is that Odenkirk and his crew found a way to work within its financial limitations as successfully as any film since Kevin Smith’s “Clerks”.

The story centers around four people who get together for dinner at a Melrose bistro. Melvin, Joey, Alex, and Sarah have one of those rambling conversation about religion, relationships, and, um, anal sex fetishes familiar to any group of friends who have proved the equation time plus wine yields increasingly personal revelations.  This universal dynamic takes the four of them into conversational spaces that are normally too uncomfortable to share, and even has a few surprises about their relationship to one another.

Michael Blieden’s screenplay is only occasionally funny and never quite as profound as it tries to be, its look at men and women lacking the insightful wit of Woody Allen or the vicious smart-bombs of Neil Labute. But it’s smart, well-observed, and it weaves in a number of amusing flashback narratives which showcase Odenkirk’s sketch comedy sensibility. In two sequences—Jack Black appearing as the “creatrix” of the universe trapped in human form and David Cross popping in for a “Me-First” seminar—the movie veers into “Mr. Show” territory, lacking only the surrealist twist to mark them as the usual Odenkirk material.

These are not the film’s best scenes, however, as their improvisational qualities distract from a narrative that proves tighter than it first appears. It’s when Odenkirk uses a montage to tell the story of Joey’s trip to Houston, in which he nearly cheats on his wife, that the film incorporates his dry, absurdist sensibility in a fresh way. The material is subtler, but just as funny as Odenkirk’s usual humor. He gives us a shot of Joey on the bed in his hotel room, for example, and then pans left for a closeup of a room-service hamburger which then dissolves into another hamburger at a nightclub, taking us into a new scene. The transition off of such an inocuous object is ridiculous but somehow disarmingly funny.

In another scene, he frames a couple having intercourse in a car in a prosaic two-shot, the woman wearing a hard hat to keep her head from hitting the passenger-side door. Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk: sex demystified into a repetitive motor activity as dull as hammering a two-by-four. Moments like these hint that Odenkirk might indeed have a future as a comic director, for his gift is in presenting odd juxtapositions of everyday elements that turn his bourgeois grotesques upside down. The same sort of jokes can be found in David O. Kelley films like “Flirting With Disaster”, or most Ben Stiller comedies, but Odenkirk’s realm, as it was on “Mr. Show”, is that of white-bread middlebrow conformity rather than ultra-sophisticated cosmopolitan dysfunction.

“Melvin Goes To Dinner” features an excellent cast made up of unknowns, like Blieden, Stephanie Courtney, and Matt Price, as well as familiar but underexposed actors, like Maura Tierney and Annabel Gurwitch. They don’t have much to say that’s provocative or witty, it’s true, but neither is the conversation riddled with beer-commercial quips or bloated with ironic pleasure at its own self-acknowledged vapidity (no Seventies sit-coms are deconstructed by anyone as if they were “Moby-Dick”, thankfully, although “All In The Family” is mentioned once to make a point). In the end the film’s charm radiates from its warm and candid portrayal of the sort of after-work symposiums one overhears in restaurants all the time. Put together as a genuine attempt at communication rather than a grab-bag of set pieces, “Melvin Goes To Dinner” is a modest but pleasant debut for Odenkirk.