The sad little joke of Marriage Story, Noah Baumbach’s lively and aching new Netflix film—which premiered here at the Venice International Film Festival on Thursday—is that it’s not the story of a marriage so much as it is about the end of one. For many people, I guess, that’s a big part of a marriage—the painful dissolution, the settling of some accounts, and the dawning of a hard-won knowledge that some others will remain outstanding maybe forever. There’s a sorry sweetness in the work of disentangling; it says something about how much love went into the union to begin with. Mutual resentment is its own kind of passion, a rueful reality that Baumbach and his stars, Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver, illustrate with great detail and care.

Yes, this is another movie about the misadventures of relatively wealthy, straight white people. That may, understandably, put some people off. But Baumbach does enough to individuate his film, drawing from what I’m assuming is some personal history to gnaw at specific things. Marriage Story is a sharp, ardently felt, fair movie, giving both sides their due and finding a melancholy kind of parity by the end.

Though one could argue that Baumbach favors Driver’s character a little bit more. He’s Charlie, an on-the-rise New York theater director whose genial enthusiasm for his work means that he’s often heedless to the needs of people around him—specifically his wife, Nicole, who gave up a fledgling Hollywood career to be the star of Charlie’s acting company. They seem to have worked well together, but Marriage Story opens when things have already fallen apart.

As Charlie and Nicole try to separate as amicably as possible, while co-parenting their 8-year-old son Henry, Baumbach teases out notes of acrimony lurking just beneath their forced, tragically optimistic attempt at harmony. Marriage Story isn’t a mean movie—it’s far gentler than the Baumbach of Margot at the Wedding or the director’s other divorce-themed magnum opus The Squid and the Whale—but it does drill deep, with Charlie and Nicole going at each other as only former lovers could.

Marriage Story is also, in its way, a movie about the age-old war between the coastal capitals, New York City and Los Angeles. Nicole moves back to L.A. to film a television pilot, Henry in tow, for what Charlie thinks will be a temporary stay. But Nicole has another itinerary in mind, setting up the main tension of the film. The bickering about who should live where goes on and on and on, but that repetition isn’t boring—it’s credible. This is how granular and exacting this process can be.

It’s harrowing to watch Nicole and Charlie slowly realize just how significant this life change is going to be, how much is seriously at stake. The film may arrive at some kind of resolution, but it’s not satisfaction. Really, what we’re witnessing is the beginning of a huge new thing. "I can’t believe I have to know you for the rest of my life!," Nicole cries in disbelief and frustration in one towering argument scene. It’s both a simple sentiment and a profound one, the realization that love has a lingering, practical weight to it—that divorce is not an eraser.

If that all sounds like a slog, fear not. Baumbach makes Marriage Story plenty funny, too. There’s levity in some of the sudden, shuffling awkwardness between two people once so intimately connected. And there are some wacky characters played by Julie Haggerty, as Nicole’s mom, and Laura Dern, as Nicole’s brassy lawyer. Sometimes the film’s erratic zaniness undermines the gnarly vérité of its darker moments, but mostly Marriage Story is well balanced. It’s charming and stinging, and it has a disarming faith in the long run, a conviction that the only way out is through, and through, and through.