Kevin Lee’s vigorous defense of Andrew Bujalski’s Beeswax in reaction to its reception at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival included a thematic interpretation of the film’s title. He wrote that Beeswax, a picture which has nothing directly to do with either bees or wax, was titled as such as “a tip to the film’s depiction of life as a hive, where people passive-aggressively fall on each other for support in the face of life’s overwhelming choices, and in doing so both limit and enable choices to be made.” It’s right to shine a light on Beeswax as a film about a community’s interconnectedness — and probable that the nuances of that specific community, Austin, might feel like flat, mundane Americana to an eye hoping for a retread of the classically cool “disaffected rocker in black and white” vibe of Mutual Appreciation. But the title also seems like something of a multi-layered reference to the film’s ambitious leap ahead of Bujalski’s previous filmography. Having built a following based on two finely calibrated odes to linguistic imprecision, Bujalski’s third film moves away from messy, non-committal “mumbling”, in order to cleverly examine the double-speak of slang, simile and idiom that flows through American conversation without interrogation. As a moniker for this crayon-colorful (and beautifully shot by regular DP Matthias Grunsky) comedy steeped in colloquial American English, the title Beeswax feels less like a metaphor for anything bees do in public, than a veiled reference to private lives - as in, “mind your own beeswax.”

Bujalski built the script around actual twin sisters Maggie and Tilly Hatcher, who play twin sisters Lauren and Jeannie; both non-actors, the former appeared in the director’s student thesis film at Harvard, and the latter’s real-life use of a wheelchair makes it into the film. Jeannie’s disability is never specified or commented on in Beeswax, but the fact of it informs much of the incidental action and its ultimate themes. The sisters are exceptionally unwilling to let men dictate the course of their sexual relationships, and though highly characterized, the male presence in this film is essentially reduced to boyfriend roles, all given over to Austin-based filmmakers. David and Nathan Zellner, the masterminds of Goliath and the recent batshit insane web series Fiddlestixx, respectively play Lauren’s ex and his weirdly flirtatious brother, who sets Lauren up with a last-minute job offer in Kenya. Alex Karpovsky, whose oddly fascinating improv comedy concert film Trust Us, This is All Made Up premiered at SXSW this year, plays Jeannie’s ex-boyfriend Merill, a fledgling lawyer who thrives on solving his former love’s every crisis.

Jeannie is having a falling out with the old friend with whom she owns a vintage shop, and worried that her business partner is getting litigious, Jeannie contacts Merrill for advice. An evening spent decoding the language of a business contract resolves, as Jeannie puts it semi-ironically, in “hot sex,” and soon Merrill is back in her life, actively angling for a more substantial relationship while trying to make Jeannie’s business problems disappear. It’s some kind of reconciliation romance, but Beeswax is more complicated than your average comedy of remarriage. It slowly emerges that Jeannie might have called Merrill not just because she was in crisis, but because she knew he’d be attracted to her crisis, and her need is thus, in a way, a gift to him, something to fill up his own need. As the narrative unfolds, Jeannie’s lacks (her inability to decipher a business contract, her inability to walk) are balanced out by her the lacks of those around her: her sister’s fear of commitment, her sometime-boyfriend’s emotional neediness, her business partner’s inability to equally participate in the business. Though literally crippled, Jeannie emerges as the bravest, most capable person on screen.

In vocal cadence if not body language, Karpovsky’s playing a character that one could easily imagine Bujalski, who does not appear in Beeswax, having taken for himself in one of his earlier films. If Beeswax is, as I suspect, above all else a film about language, than Merrill, though deprived of real agency in his relationship with Jeannie, is a crucial player because he sets much of the linguistic action into motion. Not only do he and Jeannie turn the interpretation of documents into a kind of foreplay, but in blurting out something accidentally horrible and then devoting exponentially more words to detailing his remorse, he sets the tone for the film’s second half, in which the precise application of words — particularly, unexpectedly bold statements and idiosyncratic metaphors like “shit sandwich” — has the force of small bombs, perhaps not causing irrevocable damage but definitely altering space, time and perception in the moment.

In creating a uniquely cerebral film in which the bulk of the drama is based on which words will fly out of mouths and what they’ll really mean, Bujalski has made a “talky” film that lovingly critiques the mysteries of speech. At the film’s climax, two of our heroes look at a letter, and one asks the other, “You like that language?” The response: “Beautiful.” It is.

This review appeared in slightly different form during the SXSW Film Festival. Beeswax opens at Film Forum in New York on Friday.