Almost 30 years old, New Yorker Lola (Greta Gerwig) is happy. She’s almost finished with her dissertation, and her longtime boyfriend, Luke (Joel Kinnaman), has just proposed to her. As the wedding plans are set in motion and her parents (Bill Pullman, happy to see him somewhere, and Debra Winger) book flights for relatives, Lola comes home to the apartment she shares with Luke, and immediately notices his ashen face: he can’t get married, it’s over, and he’s leaving her. From here, the main conflict is established reasonably well: Lola is at a loss. Where does she go from here in her love life?

Seeing Gerwig in this charming but slight little romantic comedy brings me back to seeing her in some of the mumblecore movies from a few years ago, specifically Hannah Takes the Stairs and Nights and Weekends. In director Joe Swanberg’s amusing if totally meandering scenes of actors improvising their way through a loose story, Gerwig comes out with her head held high by at least trying to engage her fellow players. (In Weekends, she was especially effective as a girl in a long-distance relationship with conflicted emotions.) Now she’s grown up a bit more—she doesn’t have quite as many “ums” and what-not in her vocal mannerisms, and she’s assured playing off experienced pros, like Pullman and Winger—plus she’s in a film that has a more solid script.

This doesn’t mean that Hollywood will be knocking down doors trying to get her to be the next Julia Roberts (maybe more like Brittany Murphy?), but she has the chops for it. She can be funny, amused, or bemused, and she pulls off some of the more dramatic stuff fairly well. She’s not an all-around great dramatic actress just yet. When Lola goes off the deep end with self-pity, I didn’t quite buy that she was as sullen and downtrodden as she claimed to be.

Director Daryl Wein seems to be making a bridge between his previous film, Breaking Upwards, a shoestring character piece (with a $15,000 budget), and a more conventional film (there’s even a  getting-dressed-for-a-date-in-front-of-the-mirror montage). His direction is more polished here, and he even has the gusto to try for a sort of allegorical opening sequence, where Lola is on a beach surrounded by bottles and looking disorientated (not as flashy as Boardwalk Empire, but it’s impressive considering how straightforward everything else is in the film). The film is at its best focusing on Lola and the troubles she has moving on from her relationship with Luke and what also unfolds with Luke’s good friend Henry (the very amiable Hamish Linklater). The central question, what will be the next step in her life, runs strong, especially in the last act.

Where I find fault with the film is the abundance of awkwardness/quirkiness from some of the supporting characters. As in so many romcoms, the protagonist has the best friend who acts like a sounding board with made-to-order punch lines, and here co-writer Zoe Lister Jones plays the role of Alice, Lola’s odd duck of a friend. There’s a gag where she takes OxyContin before a party thinking mistakenly it’s oxytocin to bring on immediate orgasms. There is also a subplot with Nick (Ebon Moss-Bacharach), who happens to be a nut bar. He has the kind of strange dialog that should make most women run for the hills, but not Lola.

I liked the movie, with the caveats that I just mentioned, and with the knowledge that I may have ultimately liked Gerwig’s performance more than her character. Lola can be impulsive, disarranged, and does things from time to time that will divide the audience on how they feel about her. However, within its small ambitions, Lola’s worth a rental.