‘20th Century Women’ is a feminist comedy for the ages

Despite being set in the late 1970s, “20th Century Women” feels like the perfect movie for this moment.

Writer/director Mike Mills sets one montage to Jimmy Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” speech, in which the president reflects on “the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.” I mean, come on.

But Mills is generally working in more universal themes, his alternating-character narration often phrased as if explaining humanity to an alien: This is an elephant. This is dancing. As in his previous film, “Beginners,” he is tackling the question of how to be a decent person, with a tremendous amount of generosity and humor. There aren’t any Bad Guys to speak of. There are only people trying to figure it all out.

Here, it’s Dorothea (Annette Bening), a single mother in Santa Barbara, Calif., who is doing the figuring, for herself and for her teenage son Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann). Their extended family consists of two boarders in Dorothea’s rambling house, the punk-rocker photographer Abbie (Greta Gerwig) and the hippie handyman William (Billy Crudup), plus Jamie’s platonic best friend Julie (Elle Fanning). Dorothea enlists Abbie and Julie to help Jamie become a good man — whatever they collectively decide that means.

Bening, who works sparingly enough to make us really appreciate her when she’s around, has never been better as the chain-smoking, Birkenstock-clad Dorothea, an old-school feminist who seems slightly bemused by the sexual revolution.

Bening, who works sparingly enough to make us really appreciate her when she’s around, has never been better as the chain-smoking, Birkenstock-clad Dorothea, an old-school feminist who seems slightly bemused by the sexual revolution and (rightly) apprehensive about what’s coming next. Her frugality and blunt talk is eye-rolled by her son: “She’s from the Depression,” he sighs to friends.

Gerwig, in a short scarlet hairdo, breaks through her usual screwball-pixie typecasting to play a woman dealing with the aftermath of cervical cancer. She takes the job of mentoring seriously, teaching Jamie to navigate mosh pits and read radical feminist literature (in one of the funniest scenes, he gets in a schoolyard fistfight over the politics of orgasm).

The men in “20th Century Women” are no less important than the females. Crudup shines when playing characters who are slightly at sea, and here he’s a gentle, sexy presence, making himself genially available for trysts and quasi-fatherly advice (“Never have sex with just the vagina. You have to have sex with the whole woman,” he imparts to Jamie at a dinner party). Zumann, the receptacle for all this boho wisdom, plays the role with a terrific blend of vulnerability and slowly budding confidence.

Mills seems on his way to becoming an auteur powerhouse like Wes Anderson, if less of a perfectionist. On the contrary, he writes dialogue that doesn’t exactly sound like dialogue, lines that often tumble over one another the way they do in reality. And these are definitely all people I’d love to know in real life.