The word Mumblecore is stuck to this cohort like a piece of gum on the sole of a shoe, but “Drinking Buddies” — along with other recent movies by Lynn Shelton and the Duplass brothers — represents an advance, not only toward the entertainment mainstream but also toward a more polished and confident style. “Drinking Buddies” follows the eddies and digressions of everyday life. Mr. Swanberg’s camera weaves through bodies at rest, at work and at the bar in no particular hurry, and his script captures the idioms of men and women who are equally inclined to waste words and to say very little. But the busy tedium of their lives is given shape and direction by the skill of the cast and by the precision of the director’s eye, ear and editing instincts.

Mr. Livingston looks credibly tired and confused as a guy who has stayed young for too long. Mr. Johnson is cranky and likable, playing a fully bearded variation on his gruff, needy “New Girl” character. Ms. Kendrick beautifully conveys Jill’s anxiety as she tries to reconcile her own needs with the unspoken imperatives to keep everything happy and casual. When she and Luke talk about getting married, their negotiations are pitch-perfect meta-conversations — they talk about someday talking about the things they claim not to be talking about at all — delivering the insight that passive-aggression is nowadays less a personal trait than a cultural norm.

But it is Ms. Wilde’s determined, slightly manic energy that keeps the story going. Kate is constantly in motion, navigating an otherwise all-male workplace with easy, one-of-the-guys humor and zipping from the bar to Chris’s apartment on her bicycle. In an early scene, Chris, who always seems to be brooding about something, interrupts their foreplay with a gift: a copy of John Updike’s “Rabbit, Run,” whose wayward, impulsive hero he says reminds him of Kate. This is a fascinating and unlikely idea, since Rabbit Angstrom has been, for generations of readers, the very embodiment of entitled male narcissism. Is Chris just taking a weird literary swipe at Kate, or has he glimpsed a truth about gender relations in a post-Updike world?

In many ways, though, “Drinking Buddies” proposes a corrective to the Updikean assumption that sexual intercourse is the ground and horizon of modern male-female relations. Kate and Luke are obviously in love, and for a while, the operative question seems to be not whether they will sleep together but when.