Available on DVD: “Safety Not Guaranteed”

Safety Not Guaranteed, a big hit at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, is exactly what independent films should be yet rarely are. It’s brisk and assured and never begs the audience’s indulgence. No time is wasted. The movie is, at every moment, either funny or pushing the story forward, or both.

At the same time, it’s original and odd in the best of ways. It takes as a jumping-off point a real-life advertisement, spotted by screenwriter Derek Connolly, in which someone was looking for a companion for a time-traveling expedition. From that material an imaginative comedy is spun, about a magazine writer (Jake M. Johnson) and two interns, a depressive young woman (Aubrey Plaza) and a shy young man (Karan Soni), who go in search of the guy who wrote the ad.

Plaza, in her first major big-screen role, creates a warm portrait of a woman whose sullen and sardonic personality just barely conceals a sensitive and questing nature. Posing as someone answering the ad, she gets to know the man who placed it, and he’s a genuinely odd character — a basement inventor, a gun enthusiast and a paranoid.

Indeed, if there is one thing ever-so-slightly off about the movie, it’s that the would-be time traveler is perhaps a bit too crazy. When he starts waving guns around, for example, it’s hard to believe that she’d continue to research the story. Under Colin Trevorrow’s direction, Mark Duplass plays the role straight, as he should — he has little choice — but one does sense an actor and a director feeling their way over imperfections and rough areas in the script.

Yet ultimately this becomes a small concern. Much of the appeal of Safety Not Guaranteed derives from the filmmakers’ sense of proportion. Some of this can be found in Connolly’s writing, some in the attention and detail of Trevorrow’s direction, but there is, throughout, an understanding that every character is of interest, and that each of their journeys is important.

In a sense, everyone in the movie is on a search. The inventor wants to go back in time literally and speaks with lyrical delicacy about hearing a song dating from an earlier, happier time in life. Meanwhile, the journalist wants to go back in time emotionally. He wants to take up with a former girlfriend, and he wants to be the catalyst for other people’s great memories. As the journalist, Johnson’s performance is the film’s most sophisticated, in that it suggests things that the actor knows, but the character doesn’t.

The filmmakers are shrewd enough to leave him in a state of suspension, close to embracing his own magnificence and throwing off his undermining self-hatred, but not there yet. This is a fun and funny little movie, but the level of perception at work here is superior.