Charlie and Nicole are the married couple on the train. You’d be forgiven if you didn’t notice though. Despite the pair being the toast of Off-Off-Broadway, with him the prestigious director of an underfunded theater company and her its brightest star, when they come back from a party, they’re not on the same page—they’re not even on the same subway bench. Nicole sits quietly on the 3 train’s empty pew, and Charlie stands across the aisle, despondent. They are still together, and given their marriage story includes the birth of a loved son, they always will be, in a way. But they’re headed in different directions even when they’re on the same track.

This is one of the many provocative images percolating in Noah Baumbach’s sweet and unexpectedly warm film about the end of a marriage, but not entirely the love it was built upon. Forty years after Robert Benton essayed the struggles of divorce with the solemnity of a war crime in Kramer vs. Kramer, Baumbach crafts a more complex, intimate, and funnier film that makes the pain of truly irreconcilable differences all the bitterer. It is Baumbach’s most mature effort to date, and one that offers career-defining turns for its two leads, Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson.

Fittingly having just debuted at the New York Film Festival, Marriage Story is defined by its NYC identity. In fact, it’s that insistent outer borough charm which proves the catalyst for a divorce that begins amicably and ends with lawyers gleeful about a “street fight” in court. For while Nicole (Johansson) admires that Charlie (Driver) is the transplant who is more New Yorker than any narive, she’s never really felt rooted there. Ten years after she moved to the city and gave up a budding film career to be with Charlie, she’s taken a television pilot back in Los Angeles, which also just happens to be where her mother and sister are… and where she and Charlie were married, as well as where their son was born.

That distinction of marriage licenses and son Henry’s (Azhy Robertson) birth certificate turns out to be titanic as far as the legal system is concerned. Charlie might be a great father, but he is also greatly involved in his own work and self-image as an emerging Broadway wunderkind, and he can no more imagine living in the sunny soullessness of LA than he can in a world where Henry isn’t nearby. But he might have to choose as, for the first time in years, Nicole is actually pursuing what she wants, especially after taking a meeting with high-powered SoCal attorney Nora (Laura Dern).