Jason Schwartzman does not want his picture taken with this book.

As someone with a taste for films with thoroughlyunpleasantprotagonists, and with a fondness for Jason Schwartzman, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I quite enjoyed Alex Ross Perry’s latest film, “Listen Up Philip,” in which Schwartzman plays about as unpleasant a protagonist as he’s ever assayed.

That protagonist is Philip Lewis Friedman, a notable (or is it noteworthy? Philip actually muses about this question) young New York novelist who has just seen his second novel come out. Philip celebrates the happy occasion by telling off his ex-girlfriend (for being late to meet him), and his ex-roommate (for not having held up his end of their pact to become great writers together), and his publisher (for no obvious reason; he simply announces that he isn’t going to do any promotion for his own book, and that’s that) – and then, having cleared his calendar, fleeing his supportive-in-more-ways-than-one-but-starting-to-lose-patience current girlfriend, Ashley (Elizabeth Moss, giving an expressive performance with great economy), with and on whom he has been living for two years, to hang out upstate with his Philip Roth-esque literary hero, Ike Zimmerman (a pitch-perfect Jonathan Pryce), who is in need of a protégé to tutor in the ways of misanthropy and misogyny.

So far, so satiric, and the satire is biting indeed. Philip is an exaggerated character, but the stunts he pulls and the demands he makes are all familiar enough to anyone familiar with the lives of writers (though few are quite as relentless as Philip is). Philip isn’t just a colossal narcissistic jerk; he’s both clever and clueless – clever enough to know that telling a girlfriend “I’m telling you this to hurt you” will actually be effective at disarming her of any possible response, clueless enough actually to be surprised when another girlfriend, with whom he hasn’t spoken in months, decides that is no longer her status, and changes the lock. The pervasive visual satire is the funniest, and never funnier than when sending up the look of Zimmerman’s dust jackets through the decades.

The satire gets considerably juicier all around when Ike Zimmerman enters the scene, and we can observe the contrast in narcissisms between the literary generations. Zimmerman is a monster of ego, who has fully earned the hatred of his daughter (the luminously furious Krysten Ritter), but he can fairly claim to have labored to satisfy his voracious appetite, whether for women or literary acclaim. I believed his daughter’s fury – but I also believed that she can’t quit him in spite of all. Philip is fully his equal in ego, and – in a nice departure from the too-common trope of the whiny Millennial slacker – respectably if not extraordinarily productive. But rather than assault life to salve his essential loneliness, as Zimmerman does (ineffectively, in the final analysis), Philip sips his bitter cup in silence, daring life (women, publishers) to rescue him. And he’s clever enough for it to be believable that he’s genuinely talented, and therefore for us to believe that he can get these women to put up with him. But only for a time, and it’s hard to picture any of them ever wanting to bear his children.

Though the story is ultimately Philip’s, the narrative gives ample time to Ashley and Zimmerman – enough time that we begin to truly see them as separate people, not devices who exist for the sake of Philip’s story line. But when I step back, it’s clear to me that this impression of separateness, too, is a device, that even the contours of Ashley’s independence from Philip are driven by the demands of the central narrative. I use that word, “narrative,” with particular emphasis, because this story is not just shown, it is narrated, in voice-over (by Eric Bogosian) so exceptionally heavy-handed that one can only conclude the filmmaker wanted to be absolutely certain we would be conscious of it as a device, and ask how it should be “read.” If “Listen Up Philip” were a novel, a narrative voice this strong would beg to be interrogated as to its reliability; we would be forced to ask whose voice this is, and what its agenda might be.

Well, given that Ike Zimmerman is a Philip Roth stand-in, and that the titles are in a famous Roth font, and that Roth has a strong penchant for writing novels narrated by characters named “Philip Roth” or by transparent surrogates like Nathan Zuckerman, and that he wrote a novel, The Ghost Writer, about the relationship between a rising young writer and a bitter older literary lion (modeled on Bernard Malamud), that bears a striking resemblance to the premise of this film . . . well, when you put it all together, it feels like the movie’s voice-over is begging to be read as the creation of Philip Lewis Friedman (or, whatever hypothesized persona is Roth to Philip’s Zuckerman). In other words, the film’s view of Philip – as unrelentingly selfish and arrogant, and therefore doomed to misery – is Philip’s own. As is the larger view of the world: a place where men are uniformly miserable (they are young and lonely, and either grow old and bitter, or they commit suicide as another rising writer does), and where women are uniformly made miserable by these narcissistic men (and can only find peace if they settle for the affections of a cat they are mildly allergic to).

When I describe the world of the movie that way, in all of its comprehensive male self-pity, it seems all the more plausible that Philip is the author of the film. Which raises the question: what kind of response is that author trying to get from us? Is the “real” Philip so much like the Philip we see on screen that we can view this entire film as one of his clever manipulations of our emotions, daring us to rescue him from his own misery by watching it, analyzing it, praising it, wanting to meet him and ask him whether we got it?

I guess it worked.