Nicole Holofcenter’s new film “You Hurt My Feelings” is basically another typical urban comedy drama set in New York City, but it is a pretty good one nonetheless. Mainly revolving around human relationship issues surrounding truth and lie, the movie often makes a funny and shrewd point on its main subjects without any condescension on its main characters, and we come to laugh more as seeing more of ourselves from them.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who has been like a more sardonic sister of Tina Fey to me since I watched her hilarious Emmy-winning performance in HBO comedy series “Veep”, plays Beth, a New York City writer who has been working on her latest work since making a modest success from the memoir based on her childhood verbal abuse. Although there has been not much progress for her yet despite a series of drafts, Beth’s life is mostly fine and comfortable as you can expect from your average affluent middle-class New Yorker, and we later see her happily celebrating their wedding anniversary with her husband Don (Tobias Menzies, who looks much more down-to-earth compared to his sternly regal Emmy-winning supporting turn in the third and fourth season of Netflix TV drama series “The Crown”).

However, there soon comes a crack in her small private world. While Beth is spending some free time with her sister Sarah (Michaela Watkins) outside, they happen to spot Don talking with Sarah’s husband Mark (Arian Moayed) and then come to eavesdrop on the conversation without noticed by Don or Mark. Don happens to be talking about Beth’s work in progress, and Beth is shocked and devastated to realize that Don has been lying about his actual feelings and thoughts on her novel. He does not like her novel at all in fact, but he has lied to her for, yes, not hurting her feelings.

Of course, Beth feels hurt a lot as a result, and that makes her reflect more on not only her relationship with Don but also her current status as a writer. While her supposedly acclaimed memoir seems fairly good despite its rather rote title, she has not published anything notable since the memoir, which is now almost forgotten as reflected by an amusing moment between her and her writing class students. Maybe she really needs some honesty and truth from her husband for any resolution to the current dead end in her work in progress, but she also finds herself quite reluctant about openly discussing that with Don, as still wincing from that hurtful moment of revelation.

Meanwhile, the movie also focuses on several people around Beth – and how their life and relationships are often maintained by small and big white lies. As a psychiatrist, Don wants to help his patients as much as possible, but most of them do not seem to appreciate his help and support much, and he even later finds himself cornered by one very problematic couple. While he prefers to pull punches in case of giving some hard counsel, there eventually comes a point where he begins to doubt his professional ability, and we get some amusement when his wife casually assures that he is still good as before. Regardless of what she thinks of his professional ability, she simply gives him some perfunctory support as his spouse, and, as arguing more on their respective white lies later in the story, both she and Don come to discern that a good relationship sometimes needs a bit more than mere honesty and trust. Truth is always important indeed, but it surely hurts a lot sometimes, and any good couple knows well that consensual lie can be a better option at times, even though they may have to face truth someday.

Their relationship is often compared with Sarah and her husband’s relationship, which is often shaken up by the matters involved with his longtime professional insecurity. As Sarah admits, Mark is not always good in his acting, but she does not tell anything bad to him as understanding well his insecure ego, and she is certainly ready to support him more when he gets suddenly fired from his latest play and then seriously considers quitting his acting career.

Without judging its main characters at all, Holofcenter’s screenplay illustrates them with loving care and sharp attention. Although they are flawed in one way or another, they come to us as engaging characters with recognizable human details, and we come to care about them more even while having some good laughs on the absurdities generated from their human flaws.

Holofcenter also draws solid comic performances from her main cast members. While bringing lots of life and personality to her character, Louis-Dreyfus is deft and precise in her natural comic timing in her several key scenes, and Tobias Menzies complements her performance well with his low-key acting in addition to having his own moments from a series of psychiatric session scenes in the movie (Amber Tamblyn and David Cross are particularly hilarious as the aforementioned troubled couple in therapy). On the opposite, Michaela Watkins and Arian Moayed are effective as a counterpoint to Louis-Dreyfus and Menzies, and Owen Teague and Jeannie Berlin are also fun to watch as Beth’s son and mother, respectively.

Overall, “You Hurt My Feeling” is another delightful work from Holofcenter, who previously made “Please Give” (2010) and “Enough Said” (2013) and then received an adapted screenplay Oscar nomination for “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” (2018). Although it stumbles a bit around its rather abrupt epilogue part, the movie is still quite funny and insightful as a human comedy, and it is surely one of more enjoyable films of this year.