(CNN) -- Noah Baumbach is emerging as an emotionally acute, not to say eviscerating, observer of the middle-class intelligentsia, the kind of people who write letters to "The New York Times" and might plausibly pop up in a Woody Allen movie. 

Unlike the Woodman, Baumbach doesn't show his face on screen, but his films are no less personal for that: "The Squid and the Whale" was a sometimes wincingly autobiographical account of two boys torn between their divorcing parents, and he's not one to deflect an insight with a wisecrack. The cracks just cut deeper. I've rarely experienced an audience recoil from a character as passionately as they did to Nicole Kidman's toxically self-absorbed writer in "Margot at the Wedding" (maybe her best performance, incidentally). These are comedies in the sense that the characters are painfully ridiculous -- and all too recognizably real -- but Baumbach sure doesn't make it easy for himself, or us. 

Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller) is another neurotic narcissist, a middle-aged loner who comes back to Los Angeles to house-sit while his brother enjoys a long vacation in the Far East. Greenberg (only his brother calls him Roger) can feed the family dog, but the truth is that he desperately needs to regroup and recharge after a spell in a mental hospital. 

He has one friend, Ivan (Rhys Ifans), who still has time for him and a wider circle of former friends who don't. We soon learn that Greenberg used to front a band, but it fell apart after he turned down a recording deal, and he's been in New York ever since, under-achieving on a permanent basis. 
What city does the character come back to?
Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller) is another neurotic narcissist, a middle-aged loner who comes back to Los Angeles