Available on DVD: “Damsels in Distress”

Most of the characters in Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress — the principal damsels, for sure, and also some of the lads identified in the opening titles as "their distress" — speak in complete sentences and express complex, sometimes startlingly original ideas. This, friends, is news: a movie populated by young people who do not mumble, swear, punctuate their utterances with "like" or think that an incredulous "really?" represents the apogee of wit. Even if it did not have other charms, this peculiar, uneven campus comedy would be worth seeing for the delightful felicity of its dialogue.

Stillman, who is 60, might be accused of idealizing some of the student body of Seven Oaks College, a venerable, prestigious and imaginary institution, but he is wholly innocent of the greater sin of condescension. The manners and morals of fledgling members of the privileged class have always interested this director, who made three sweet, astringent comedies in the 1990s before receding into a much remarked-upon, now thankfully concluded, obscurity.

His first film, Metropolitan (1990), was set in the vestigial but still vigorous world of oldish New York money (the "urban haute bourgeoisie," as one earnest preppy memorably puts it). That was followed by Barcelona (1994) and The Last Days of Disco (1998), which pursued the same kind of articulate, self-conscious, well-bred people into the strange worlds of Spain and Manhattan nightlife.

You could say that 22 years after his debut and 14 years after Disco, he has come full circle, returning to the romantic travails of ruling-class late adolescence. But the world has changed — perhaps more than some of us have realized — and Damsels in Distress is remarkable for feeling both exquisitely observant and completely untethered to any recognizable social reality.

I think that this is deliberate, that the occasional outlandishness of the film arises not because Stillman is out of touch with the way things are, but rather because he wants them to be different, and avails himself of the artist’s prerogative to make them that way. You can despair of the state of civilization or decide, in spite of abundant evidence to the contrary, that its codes and customs still exist and that you will defend them. "Build, therefore, your own world," Ralph Waldo Emerson instructed the youth of 1837. Stillman does just that, even if his world is grounded in the counter-Emersonian values of tradition and conformity.

Stillman’s heroine, Violet Wister (Greta Gerwig), is a marvelous paradox. She is stubbornly self-invented — her name is not really Violet, and she does not seem to belong by birth to the caste whose behavioral norms she espouses — and at the same time profoundly hostile to individualism. Perhaps, like her creator, she is a deeply idiosyncratic conservative, a believer in propriety and continuity, standing athwart history and saying, "Not so fast." Her staunch defense of the college’s "Roman letter" fraternity system is based on some curious logic. She reasons that the clubs cannot be accused of elitism because their members are "morons," a belief in the alignment of status and intelligence so naïve that it might almost make you weep.

Violet and her crew of horticulturally named friends — Rose (Megalyn Echikunwoke), Heather (Carrie MacLemore) and an ambivalent latecomer named Lily (Analeigh Tipton) — see themselves as missionaries. They run the campus suicide prevention center, providing doughnuts and dance classes for their gloomy schoolmates, and they date frat boys out of a combination of pity and civilizing zeal. It is better to date losers than cool guys, Violet says, because the love of a superior woman can lift a mediocre man toward better things. This is a very old (not to say retrograde) idea, and also perhaps a succinct explanation of recent trends in American film comedy.

The Roman-lettermen of Seven Oaks are very dumb indeed. One of them has reached college without being able to identify colors, while another — Violet’s erstwhile boyfriend, Frank (Ryan Metcalf) — has the spelling ability of a kindergartner and the attention span of an even younger child.

The only alternative to these "doufi" (in the film’s "nonstandard, but preferred" spelling) are what Rose, in her clipped British accent, calls "playboys and operators." One of these might be a fellow named Charlie (unless his name is Fred; in either case he is played by Adam Brody) who appears to take a romantic interest in both Violet and Lily. Lily, meanwhile, has a complicated relationship with a French graduate student named Xavier (Hugo Becker).

As ever, Stillman’s attitude toward female sexuality treads the border between chivalry and squeamishness. There is some discreet discussion of the erotic habits of the Cathars, a heretical French sect whose favored practice (at least according to Xavier) is more usually associated with the citizens of Sodom in the Old Testament. But reticence rules the universe of Damsels in Distress. It is not that sex is denied or repressed, exactly, but rather that bodily desires are ultimately less consequential than more exalted longings, chief among them the yearning to figure out the world and one’s place within it.

Good luck with that. In pursuit of this knowledge, Lily and Violet, the two contrasting damsels — one bony and brown-haired, the other big-boned and blond; one a questioning skeptic, the other a true believer — wander and ruminate. Neither the film nor its characters seem to be in any particular hurry, and there are times when the plot wobbles and slows like a weakly spun top.

Stillman’s control of the tone also seems wobbly. The far-fetched absurdism of some of the humor — the boy who doesn’t know his colors, for instance — rubs awkwardly against some of the sharper satirical insights. The musical score, by Mark Suozzo and Adam Schlesinger (Fountains of Wayne), evokes a bad television movie from the 1980s, and its deployment is as haphazard as the pacing and juxtaposition of the scenes. The actors often lack direction, both in the sense that they do not seem to have been instructed in how to play their roles and also in the more literal sense that they do not always appear to know which way to walk, or how fast.

Gerwig, en route from Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg to Woody Allen’s To Rome With Love, has some of the discipline that Stillman lacks. Violet is very much an intellectual construct: an ardent bluestocking who cuts against the grain by opposing the impulse to be different. But Gerwig also makes her a complicated, sympathetic and ridiculous human being, able to speak her mind clearly even when her inner and outer life threaten to become hopelessly muddled.