Writer/director Tamara Jenkins’ first film in 11 years since The Savages is worth the wait and marks another masterful foray for the filmmaker into the tragicomic foibles of everyday life.

Tamara Jenkins’ last film followed brother and sister Wendy and Jon Savage, played by a perfectly matched Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman, as they dealt with the challenge of putting their father into a nursing home. The painstaking detail, brutal honesty and tender beauty she brought to such a specific life situation she now brings to a married couple trying to conceive a child through in vitro fertilization. Jenkins once again exercises pitch perfect casting as the central couple, Rachel and Richard Grimes, are played by Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti — a match you might never expect, but once you see it here, you would think you’ve been following this couple’s journey longer than just the 124-minute runtime of this movie.

Jenkins is a master at capturing the trials and tribulations of the white upper-middle class, and she observes with empathy while never asking for sympathy for these characters; she simply has us watch the action unfold, never taking sides or claiming any one character to be right or wrong. Her striking that tone is so pivotal here. It’s in large part thanks to her perceptive and wildly detail-oriented script that might feel shaggy to some, but it’s brilliantly crafted with a string of small asides, moments, exchanges and arguments that incrementally accumulate in power. The specificity of what Rachel and Richard are going through is illustrated so vividly, you feel like you’re right there with them. Every jab of a syringe into flesh, every sterile doctor’s visit and every standstill moment in the waiting room, they’re all felt fully.

Rachel and Richard have complete lives outside of trying to get pregnant, and the script makes a point to keep that hidden from us into well into the runtime. They’ve completely lost not only years of their lives, but every sense of their careers and themselves, to this painstaking process of trial-and-error. They’re accomplished authors, playwrights and writers with pieces published in the New Yorker and reviews written about them in the Village Voice. They live in an “Instagrammable” apartment, as one character notes, with two dogs and endless stacks of books. Richard’s brother, Charlie, and his wife, Cynthia, (a superb John Carroll Lynch and Molly Shannon) watch from the sidelines and take pity on Rachel and Richard with strained support as the frustrated couple’s fertility treatments continue.

Then comes along 25-year-old Sadie, adrift, dropped out of college and trying to figure out her life as a fledgling writer. She is Charlie and Cynthia’s daughter, not related by blood to Richard, and she ends up crashing with him and Rachel while she figures out her next move. Played with bright vivacity by the wonderful Kayli Carter, she enters Rachel and Richard’s lives as a possible solution to their fertility woes. Without saying too much, the rest of the couple’s relationship with Sadie plays out in surprising, humorous and poignant ways.

What might be most remarkable about Jenkins’ style is that she takes life at face value. There is no exaggeration, no dramatization — the stakes are that of life, and that’s it, that’s enough. She’s able to wring such potent honesty and emotional value out of characters trying their best to navigate a difficult situation that is nothing extraordinary. Life manages to dish out the same disappointments repeatedly, and the only solution is to keep going along. And that’s the moral here watching Rachel and Richard go through the fertilization process to only be continually disappointed. It’s at this point in their lives that they’re in it so deep, they might as well keep going — as if they don’t know what their lives were before trying to conceive. It’s bittersweet, but that’s exactly where Jenkins’ writing lives: in the bittersweet where she can most honestly observe.

And that’s all without even really beginning to express just how good the performances are, across the board. Most notably, Kathryn Hahn, as the equal parts despondent and fiery Rachel, has perhaps never been better, and Giamatti delivers his best performance since Sideways. The two are trapped in gender-specific roles while trying to conceive, and you can tell it kills them. While this has all sounded very dramatic, the movie really is a comedy, and the jokes in the script are deftly landed by Hahn and Giamatti both with such nuanced deadpan. And then in the next scene they’ll break your heart with well-earned pathos.

It’s fitting that Private Life deals so much in cycles as the fertilization process is described in great detail, as that’s exactly the holding pattern Rachel and Richard find themselves in. They’re stuck in a cycle of their own failing, having to put their lives on hold in order to bring a new life into the world. There’s an instability and unpredictability to life that is beautifully drawn here, and I hope Jenkins doesn’t take another 11 years to bring us again into her world, one that reflects back painful but very real truths about the human condition. This is one the best films of the year.

Private Life is now streaming on Netflix.