Bill Nighy fans, rejoice: This quirky British dramedy provides a superb vehicle for the beloved British actor, perfectly suited to his preferred performance blend of dry wit and suppressed but intense emotion. Is there any modern British actor more in tune with “hanging on in quiet desperation”?

Nighy plays Alan, father to the married and eternally frustrated Peter (Sam Riley, the shape-shifting crow in the Maleficent movies). They begin the story on a road trip, the purpose of which only gradually becomes clear and is the crux of the film. I’ll not spoil the details here, but their father-son dynamic is the movie’s dramatic core, told in the form of a contemporary fable. The cheesy green screen in the driving sequences, the high-contrast cinematography in many interiors, and some encounters with exaggerated characters weave an atmosphere of modern myth — a feeling underlined by the repeated references to the parable of the Prodigal Son.

But the surrealism doesn’t undermine the characters, who are all engagingly realized. Besides Nighy’s self-centered, meticulous, achingly sad Alan — a high-end tailor, naturally — and Riley’s just-this-side-of-frantic Peter, there’s Peter’s videogame-obsessed teenage son Jack (Louis Healy), who gets a sweet subplot that adds a necessary dose of hopefulness. Then there are Margaret and Arthur (Jenny Agutter and Tim McInnerny, both wonderful), a couple Alan and Peter meet on that road trip, who return in unexpected ways to expand the scope of Alan’s story.

Margaret and Arthur’s first encounter with Alan is over a Scrabble contest with a hefty secret side bet. The word game is the film’s unifying motif, and before it acquired a title unfortunately similar to the recent Never Rarely Sometimes Always, the movie was called Triple Word Score, from the novel by Frank Cottrell Boyce, who also wrote the screenplay. (Note that the gritty, hyperreal Never Rarely couldn’t be more dissimilar to Sometimes Always, although both are recommended. One title comes from an American abortion clinic questionnaire; the other from the English etiquette for which buttons to use on a suitcoat.)

The Scrabble metaphor sort of unpacks itself, so there’s no need to belabor it here, except to say it’s as smart and amusingly off-kilter as the rest of the film. This is director Carl Hunter’s first narrative feature, and he achieves a consistency of tone that’s rare from neophyte directors, particularly those who opt for something a few degrees removed from reality. I’ve searched for other film debuts to which I might compare it — Blood Simple without the violence? Ordinary People as directed by Wes Anderson? — but Hunter’s funny, touching work resembles only itself. Remarkably few features, especially first films, strive both to paint a moving portrait of family dynamics and to skew to the slightly absurd. If Sometimes Always Never is a multiple choice quiz on how often the movie hits its mark, I’ll go with “always.”

Grade: A. Rated PG-13. Now available via the Sofa Cinema streaming service from Grail Moviehouse.

(Photo: Courtesy of Blue Fox Entertainment)