Not many American films have as smart a screenplay as Smart People. This spiked comedy of middle-class manners was written by novelist Mark Poirier and directed by Noam Murro, both first-timers in the feature-film stakes. And though it may not in the end amount to all that much, watching it is a genuine pleasure. We don’t often get to see a Hollywood cast working at full capacity like this.

True, the plot seems a bit familiar. Dennis Quaid is Professor Lawrence Wetherhold, a middle-aged academic teaching literature at university and less than enamoured of his students.

“You’ve taught me for two courses. This is the third,” says one of them, “and you still don’t know my name.”

After leaving his car in a non-parking area, it is towed away and he ends up in hospital after trying to get over the fence of the car pound to retrieve his case.

When he wakes up in bed, he is confronted by a doctor (Sarah Jessica Parker), a former pupil to whom he gave a C in her student days.

Life seems to be catching up on him on all fronts. A widower, he is plagued by a step-brother (Thomas Haden Church) who insists on staying with him and constantly tapping him for money.

His daughter (Ellen Page) has joined the Young Republicans and regards him with unalloyed contempt. She does go to see him in hospital but isn’t very sympathetic when she gets there.

Meanwhile, as he tries to get his latest critical tome published, his son (Ashton Holmes) keeps quiet about the fact that he’s had a poem accepted by the New Yorker magazine.

Under the circumstances, the prof’s hangdog look of scarcely suppressed irritation at life isn’t surprising.

What is surprising is the sudden realisation that the doctor to whom he gave a C has always had a crush on him. But his first attempt to take her out is not only opposed by his daughter as absurd but ruined by a dinner at which he talks literature at the table for 40 minutes without enquiring about the doctor’s own life. Even he realises he has become a bore.

But the good doctor persists and the professor begins to think it would be nice to have a relationship again, even if he hasn’t the faintest idea how to go about it. He may be able to forge a second life for himself and pay for his daughter to go to Stanford but only if he lets his publishers dumb down his book for a public he despises. So much for a properly feelgood ending.

This may not sound an attractive prospect, but the screenplay is often very funny in a way that’s true to American — and probably British — academic life. And the acting is superb throughout.

I’ve never seen Dennis Quaid so good as the terminal grouch who finally, and almost too late, finds a reason to emit a pawky smile. Nor Ellen Page (who impressed in Juno) as the daughter following rather too closely in her father’s footsteps, and able to seem a thorough-going bitch without entirely losing our sympathy.

We know, of course, what Church can do from Sideways — this free-loading but essentially honourable ne’er-do-well is just as good a role for him. Sarah Jessica Parker may be an acquired taste but here she shows a touching vulnerability as the smitten medic who finds she has probably bitten off more than she can romantically chew.

In all, however, Smart People doesn’t quite amount to the sum of its parts, though it does have enough parts to prove better than most cinematic excavations of American life. A promising first, in fact, for both Poirier and Murro.