At another moment in the film, the writer Pete Hamill describes nostalgia as the dominant emotion in New York and it is clear that Ms. Quinlan, who grew up on Staten Island and has lived in all five boroughs, agrees. Her grandfather on one side was the son of Irish immigrants and a truck driver, she told me. And on the other, an actor who lived in Borough Park in Brooklyn and had appeared on Broadway in “Three Is a Family,” a play by Nora Ephron’s parents, Henry and Phoebe Ephron. That grandfather eventually became a speech teacher, but it wasn’t until Ms. Quinlan was an adult, living in Waterside Plaza, the huge apartment complex in the 20s just east of F.D.R. Drive, that she began to miss and think about the cadences she had grown up with.

“You couldn’t be more removed from New York in a place like that,” she said.

One vocal complaint in recent years is that the Bloomberg administration’s global city ambitions have left New York feeling very little like New York. Although Ms. Quinlan’s film is wistful for what was, it simultaneously conveys how enduring a certain version of authenticity is. Early in the film we meet a young sanitation worker named Ben Lee of Staten Island. He tells a story about riding in the back of a car and the driver is shocked to discover, when she turns around to face him, that he is Korean-American. Having grown up around Italian-Americans, Mr. Lee learned to talk the way they did. He once had a girl obsessed with him because he was, as she put it to him, “an Asian Guido.”