Jeannie Berlin, Bradley Whitford and Michael Rapaport also star in director Brendan Walsh’s comic look at middle age and the ties that bind.

In one of the best scenes in I’ll Be Right There, a character reveals a family story involving an improbable getaway driver. Taking in this tale is her middle-aged daughter, who knows a thing or two about driving — although her role behind the wheel is more along the lines of schlepping to and fro than making a break for it. These two strong women are played, respectively, by Jeannie Berlin and Edie Falco, actors of ineffable down-to-earth zing. When, later in the movie, the screen fills with a slo-mo shot of them running side by side down a hospital corridor, it feels like a winking, loving gift, one of the giddy dividends from this wry take on family and midlife anxieties.

Wanda is the divorced mother of two sort-of grown-up kids. Daughter Sarah (Kayli Carter) is eight months pregnant and has her heart set on a church wedding, before her due date, to Eugene (Jack Mulhern), an even-keeled fellow as easygoing as she is given to hysteria. Wanda’s floundering son, Mark (Charlie Tahan of Ozark, who will reunite with Carter in the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown), has overcome problems with addiction but maintains a slippery relationship with the truth, to the chagrin of his therapist (Geoffrey Owens).

Her relationship with young college professor Sophie (Sepideh Moafi, of Black Bird and The Killing of Two Lovers) is a secret, but not one that she’s guarding too closely. Henry’s and Sarah’s responses to the revelation are sharply written and played, but more to the point is Wanda’s dawning realization that the romance isn’t all that. Sophie, who excels at compartmentalizing, tends to show up on Wanda’s front porch at odd hours, sometimes drunk and always horny.

And then there’s Wanda’s new friendship with Albert (Michael Beach), a high school classmate who recently returned to town. Though his being a firefighter and a devoted divorced dad might be a too-easy shorthand for earnest, solid goodness, there’s also something fresh and winning in the way he’s both flustered and impressed when Wanda mentions her bisexual dating status.

Working from a screenplay by Jim Beggarly (A Country Called Home, A Year and Change), Walsh struggles in the early going to strike the desired tone between dark comedy and something more anodyne — even with Falco and Berlin at the center of the opening sequence, which revolves around 68-year-old Grace (Berlin) receiving a cancer diagnosis that’s better than the one she expected. The gallows humor feels strained, and the insistent chirpiness of James Righton’s score is too much. Things settle down and find their footing with Tahan’s first scene, which provides a jolt of more complicated humor.

It would be an exaggeration to call this feature an actors’ showcase, but it’s certainly an actors’ movie, which might explain the involvement as exec producers of Falco and Jesse Eisenberg (who appeared in Free Samples, Beggarly’s first produced screenplay). In addition to Wanda’s interactions with other characters — complete with eye-rolls and precision application of the skeptical raised eyebrow — Falco finds the subtle edge in a couple of breakthrough breakdowns, with Rapaport and Berlin each providing the perfect counterbalance. Falco and Whitford are spot-on in the choice scenes they share, effortlessly slipping into the well-worn grooves and rhythms of their characters’ animosity.

Carter and Tahan lend nuance to their more broadly written roles, while Berlin keeps you hooked with everything about her — not least the syncopated rhythms of her line readings, especially when the lines have built-in snap. “It’s not gambling,” the casino habitué tells her daughter, “if you know how to play.”

Falco, involving as ever, might not be engaged in a wild gamble here, but there’s a certain risk in the ways that she and the movie circle a neat conclusion. And there’s wisdom in the way they wind up somewhere far messier, sweeter and more satisfying.