When she finds herself pregnant a couple of weeks later, she doesn't know what the hell to do. Max keeps showing up in her life. He seems to want to go on dates now. Should she tell him he got her pregnant? She barely knows him.

Unlike in Judd Apatow's "Knocked Up," with a similar circumstance and where abortion is not even mentioned by name (except for the cowardly "schma-shmortion"), "Obvious Child" is honest. There are moments of gallows humor. There are moments of deep pain and struggle. There's one great scene when Donna is in the back of a cab, and she decides to go talk to her mother so she asks the cab driver if he can turn around and go back to Manhattan. His response is rude, albeit in a cursory way, and yet she is so lost and scared that she dissolves into sobs in the back seat.

Slate manages to give us a character who has walls and a certain persona, and yet that persona constantly cracks. It's part of her act; it's part of what she "uses" for comedy. Her emotions come up against her will. When she is able to harness them, she is funny and even charming. When they get the better of her, she goes down with the ship. You can understand why Donna has loyal friends who put up with all of that. And it's also completely plausible that Max enjoys her so much. He's a subtext kind of guy. He listens to what isn't being said. He is not completely overrun by the onslaught of her wisecracks, and sometimes gives as good as he gets. He is taken aback by her dirty jokes, but isn't judgmental. "On the page," Max may seem like a cliche. But as portrayed by Lacy, he feels like a real guy, someone you've met, someone you know.

There are a couple of coincidences in the script that feel artificial, and there's a bit too much reliance on second-unit shots of Manhattan landscapes to get us from one scene to the next. But what is interesting here is the behavior, the subtext coursing beneath the text, the feeling that what comes up for these people is too big to be controlled, and yet they still try to control it. Romantic films, even good ones, often operate from cliche. "Obvious Child", an extremely self-aware film, acknowledges those cliches, and yet provides the characters a larger and more chaotic space to be themselves. The film is not anti-romantic. In many ways, it is extremely romantic. Watch Donna's reaction to when Max warms up the butter packets with his hands before giving them to her. It is an automatic gesture on his part, casual, and yet it says everything. She is nearly undone by the moment.

"Obvious Child" is Robespierre's first feature, and it is an incredibly confident debut. Watching all of these people listen, talk, behave, react, think, work stuff out…that's the genius of "Obvious Child," that's the strength and beauty of its unique wavelength.

