-By Kevin Lally

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Judd Apatow may seem ubiquitous thanks to the wide circle of comedy colleagues he supports as a producer, but Funny People is only his third feature directing effort, after the hits The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up. It’s by far his most ambitious film, which is both a good and bad thing for the audience. Good, because he’s not playing it safe and repeating himself; bad, because the movie falls short of fulfilling its risky ambitions.

With this knowing tale of Los Angeles comedians, Apatow dares to present a lead character who is often not very likeable, and to introduce a plot element that’s a potential turnoff to fans of the writer-director’s goofy, sweet and dirty movies: a life-threatening disease and the specter of death.

Adam Sandler, Apatow’s onetime roommate, continues to stretch beyond his patented volatile goofball persona and here delivers a surprisingly dark, complex and effective performance. In Funny People, he plays a variation on his own off-screen identity: George Simmons, a standup comic and star of silly hit movies like MerMan, Re-Do (in which his head appears on an infant’s body) and My Best Friend Is a Robot. Soon after the opening credits, George learns that he has a rare form of leukemia and the prognosis is bleak. He responds to the shock by performing a morbid routine at a local comedy club, where he encounters young, aspiring comedian Ira Wright (Seth Rogen), and offers him a writing gig. As the mercurial George deals with his illness, Ira’s relationship with him is constantly shifting from protégé to friend to abused hireling. George is determined to keep his grave illness a secret, but Ira convinces him to reach out to others, which leads to a reunion with his lost love, Laura (Leslie Mann, Apatow’s wife), now married to a philandering Australian businessman, Clarke (Eric Bana), and the mother of two spirited young girls (the Apatows’ own Iris and Maude, who also appeared in Knocked Up).

This would be a spoiler if the trailer didn’t already give it away, but George’s experimental treatments work and the disease goes into remission. With a second chance at life, the comic becomes obsessed with renewing his bond with Laura, no matter the impact on her marriage. The movie culminates in a screwball comedy-style third act, as George, Laura, Clarke and Ira all juggle conflicting agendas.

Clocking in at 146 minutes, Funny People is two movies in one, neither of which seems complete. The first is an alternately brooding and bawdy character study of the demons that often drive successful comedians—not necessarily what Apatow fans are expecting, though they do get plenty of his bodily-function-obsessed humor in George and Ira’s standup routines and offstage banter. (Enough with the penis jokes already!) The second is an honorable attempt at the comedy of infidelity, even if it feels somewhat shoehorned into the movie and is given a hasty resolution.

But credit Apatow for challenging himself, and Sandler for proving that he is capable of a nuanced performance. Rogen again shows that he’s best when he reveals the vulnerability beneath his coarse façade, and he has terrific chemistry with Sandler. Mann and her girls are charming enough that no accusations of nepotism need apply, and it’s a special delight to see the often heroically cast Bana return to his Aussie comedy roots. The movie also gets lots of comic mileage out of Ira’s roommates, Jonah Hill as aggressive and envious fellow comic Leo, and Jason Schwartzman as Mark, the smug star of an insipid TV sitcom called “Yo, Teach!” (of which we see several amusing glimpses).

An uneven stew of raw humor, morose reflection, male bonding and romantic intrigue, Funny People still signals an intriguing new direction for one of today’s movie comedy kingpins.