When markedly similar characters and stories start popping up everywhere, it’s more than a trend. It’s what those of us raised on vintage postmodernism call a historical phenomenon. So an intertextual analysis of “Greenberg,” “Hot Tub Time Machine” and “The Ask” (for starters) yields a startling composite portrait of the Gen X male in midlife crisis. Earlier versions of the crisis were, by and large, reactions against social norms. Members of the Greatest Generation and the one that came right after — the “Mad Men” guys, their wives and secretaries — settled down young into a world where the parameters of career and domesticity seemed fixed, and then proceeded, by the force of their own restlessness, to blow it all up.

Image MIDLIFE, NOW AND THEN “Hot Tub Time Machine” (2010), top; and “The Big Chill” (1983) Credit... Rob Mcewan/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, top; Photofest

This pattern repeated itself in the next decades, yielding variations on a story everyone seems to know. At a certain point, Dad buys a sports car, or starts a rock band, or has an affair or walks out on Mom or quits the law firm to make goat cheese. When this kind of thing happens to Mom, it’s not a crisis but an awakening. In any case, the driving impulse is to shake off the straitjacket of adulthood and find some way to feel young again.

But what if you never gave up adolescence in the first place? What if you donned the binding garment of maturity only tentatively, and accessorized it with mockery, as if it were a hand-me-down from Grandpa or an ugly shirt plucked from a used-clothing rack? And what if, from the start, your youthful rebelliousness had been a secondhand entitlement, without a clear adversary? These are the elements of Roger Greenberg’s predicament, which is shared by Milo Burke and the three 40-somethings who journey back to 1986 in “Hot Tub Time Machine.” They all seem stuck in an earlier phase of life, which wasn’t so great to begin with: Milo’s dorm room bull sessions and sexual escapades; Roger’s rock ’n’ roll dreams; that crazy time at the ski lodge with snow, cocaine, sex and spandex as far as the eye could see.

What follows that less-than-storied youth is regret, an intimation of lost possibilities that haunts everyone. There is, first of all, the squandered ambition, the professional road not taken. Milo, who was going to be the greatest painter of his time, slowly gave that up and ran aground in the world of nonprofit fund-raising. Roger balked at a record deal and lost his chance at success, just like Nick, the pet groomer in “Hot Tub Time Machine.” And then there are the former and potential girlfriends — the ones who got away but will never quite go away, tantalizing each sad-sack midlifer with visions of a bliss that might have been if he hadn’t screwed it up.

Other exemplary figures pop up repeatedly in these stories, most notably the successful friend (or, in Roger’s case, brother) who rubs your face in your own failure and the members of a younger generation on hand to do the same thing by different means. The climax of “Greenberg” comes at a party where Roger excoriates a bunch of Millennials — a bunch of 20-somethings — for the meanness that he believes is a byproduct of perfect parenting and manifests itself by a lack of reverence for Duran Duran. John Cusack expresses similar resentment in “Hot Tub” toward his character’s nephew, an inoffensive fellow, whose uncle sees him as a sexless, soulless video game addict. And Milo has Horace, an erstwhile co-worker and a more aggressive version of Milo himself, but with a virtuosity, scrambling cultural references and modes of diction that put Milo to shame. Horace is an iPod holding 10,000 songs on permanent shuffle, while Milo is a painstakingly assembled cassette mix tape.

There are variations on the story. In Judd Apatow’s “Funny People,” released last summer, Adam Sandler played a comedian-turned-movie star with the kind of money, toys and sexual opportunities that the dudes in the hot tub only dreamed of. But he had still not fully grown up, troubled by memories of lost love and premonitions of death, and also menaced by a rising, and somewhat better-adjusted, comic played by Seth Rogen.

That movie’s somewhat unstable blend of melancholy and humor was accompanied by an acute cognitive dissonance arising from the casting of Mr. Sandler. When did he, Mr. Stiller and Mr. Cusack — Lloyd Dobler! — become the older guys? And what do the rest of us have to show for aging along with them? That we saw “Reality Bites” or “Say Anything” when they first opened in theaters? That we once watched Mr. Sandler do Opera Man on “Saturday Night Live”?