In terms of plot, Casimir Nozkowski’s directorial debut The Outside Story is about as simple as it gets. The premise can be summed up as “Man locks himself out of room and has a journey of self-discovery.” Yet with a short story-like presentation and likable cast, it makes the most of this limited setting to tell a solid, if not wholly inventive, character drama. The dramedy will also make you yearn for a time before the coronavirus when conversing with your neighbors wasn’t a health hazard.

It opens with a glimpse into the Brooklyn apartment of Charles Young (Brian Tyree Henry), the editor of “In Memoriam” segments and a social introvert. Unwashed dishes and empty take-out foil containers litter his kitchen, as well as packed boxes belonging to his ex-girlfriend, Isha (Sonequa Martin-Green), who Charles broke up with after she confessed to cheating.

This saddens the neighbors who knew Isha well, whereas Charles never really interacted with them beyond stairwell trips and hearing muffled arguments. Then Charles commits a serious blunder while sprinting to give the local food deliverer a tip: taking Isha’s car keys instead of his house keys and locking himself outside. Now he has no shoes, a low phone battery, and an urgent need to send his boss a video on the life of a hospitalized actor, whose health currently hangs by a thread.

At first, this problem makes for situational comedy happening in real time: Charles needs to get back into his room but must ask assistance from people he rarely sees. In each case, he discovers various quirks and insecurities about the residents that likely would have alluded him if not for this brief moment of absentmindedness. Reentering the apartment means repeatedly asking upstairs neighbor Andre (Michael Cyril Creighton) to buzz him in, thus ruining a swinger’s night with a European couple. There’s a kindly old widower, Sara (Lynda Gravatt); Paige (Hannah Bos), who is pregnant and overdue; and Elena (Olivia Edward), a semi-reclusive girl whose overbearing, washed-up actress mother makes living at home unbearable, among others. Charles also has regular encounters with a policewoman named Slater (Sunita Mani), whose overzealousness at handing out parking tickets infuriates everyone.

It’s also a world of people who know how to forgive and enjoy the moment better than Charles, who gradually comes to terms with this lesson the more he stays on the outside. Confronting Isha’s cheating partner, Grace (Suzette Gunn), as well as Grace’s partner, Inez (Asia Kate Dillon), doesn’t produce the mournful camaraderie he expected, and seeing Andre with a couple who can share a relationship another without envy only enhances his confusion.

Brian Tyree Henry tends to excel at playing characters who can be empathetic in spite of their bizarreness (even as a conspiracy theorist in Godzilla vs. Kong), and this performance matches his strengths. We’ve all been in Charles’s shoes at one point, so it’s easy to embrace the social consequences of a problem that’s small but, like a Seinfeld episode, can often feel grandiose beyond belief.

Being one of many films delayed by the pandemic, The Outside Story’s 2020-ness is both a gift and a curse. The notion of savoring life’s little moments after being endlessly stuck in your room certainly feels relevant after more than a year of self-quarantining. Yet Charles’s relationship with Slater, despite having one amusing parking ticket gag, plays its by-the-book police officer archetype for laughs in a way that comes across as dated following the George Floyd protests, especially with how one climactic scene resolves itself. None of this is necessarily Nozkowski’s fault, but it speaks to the paradox of depicting everyday mundanity after a year where social upheaval flipped the definition of mundane on its head.

The Outside Story is more a fleeting glimpse than a three-dimensional portrait of a neighborhood, but for this specific story, that’s enough. It becomes a slice-of-life tale about one man coming to terms with his flaws thanks to the input of a select few who have been hiding under his nose the whole time.