There's something about Ben Stiller

This month, Ben Stiller -- who has appeared in nine movies that have each earned more than $100 million in domestic grosses -- served as honorary chairman of Film Independent's Spirit Awards. The incongruity was not lost on Stiller, who had some fun with it onstage.

"I think it says volumes about the organizers of this event that even though I've been in over 350 studio movies during the last five years," he said, "the Spirit Awards were bold enough to say, 'You, Ben Stiller, epitomize our core values.'"

What Stiller neglected to mention was that his new film, "Greenberg," happens to be a small-scale production with an auteur pedigree (written and directed by Noah Baumbach) and is as intimate and independent-minded a movie as he has done in years.

"I never thought my path would progress the way it has," Stiller said.

The 44-year-old son of comedians Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, he first made his mark in sketch comedy, on "Saturday Night Live" and his short-lived but fondly remembered early 1990s Fox series "The Ben Stiller Show." He thought of himself more as a director. As for acting, "I just didn't think I'd get that opportunity," he said.

Stiller has since directed four features, most recently "Tropic Thunder" in 2008, but has also become one of the biggest movie stars on the planet. He anchors family movies and romantic comedies alike, with a screen presence often synonymous with anxiety, pain and humiliation.

From his first leading role, in the 1996 screwball farce "Flirting With Disaster," he has played characters defined by their simmering resentments and festering neuroses.

"Greenberg," which opens Friday, is an often bruising character study, notable for its emotional violence. It's recognizably the creation of Baumbach, the director of "The Squid and the Whale" (2005) and "Margot at the Wedding" (2007). But it works equally well as an essay on the Ben Stiller persona.

Stiller's character, Roger Greenberg, is a habitual malcontent who returns to Los Angeles after years in New York and a nervous breakdown. A former musician who sabotaged his band on the verge of a record deal, Roger is house-sitting for his vacationing brother. Reactivating old tensions with his bandmates (Rhys Ifans and Mark Duplass) and an ex-girlfriend (Jennifer Jason Leigh), Roger also strikes up an instantly complicated relationship with Florence (Greta Gerwig), a sweetly awkward aspiring singer in her mid-20s who has a day job as his brother's personal assistant.

At first glance "Greenberg" seems like a departure for Stiller. But it doesn't take long to realize that Roger is the most extreme and most finely honed variation yet on Stiller's patented character type: the aggrieved, put-upon man-child.

Baumbach's brand of humor is more analytical than Stiller's, but both men specialize in a comedy of discomfort and mortification. You can imagine the short-fused Roger carrying the psychic burden of Stiller's other roles as a perennial punching bag.

Kindred comic spirits

Baumbach had long thought of Stiller as a kindred comic spirit and for "Greenberg," Baumbach said, he "wanted someone who knew what was funny about the part."

Stiller found plenty that was amusing about Roger, "who says things that are spot on" without censoring himself and is prone to embittered overstatements. When a friend innocently remarks that youth is wasted on the young, he sputters, "Life is wasted on -- people."

Still, the film was a change from the wham-bam comedic rhythms typically demanded of Stiller. "It felt great to not be in a movie that had to be servicing laughs," he said.

Stiller is used to treating a script as a "working blueprint," he said, something to smooth out and punch up on the fly. But Baumbach, an exacting writer, is not keen on improvisation. Stiller said it was "freeing and really kind of exciting" to realize that "this isn't going to be a process of me making the script feel more comfortable for myself as an actor; it's going to be about me as an actor trying to understand the character more."

Stiller has wanted to branch out from mainstream comedy for some time. There are the usual big movies on the horizon -- a new Fockers movie is due later this year -- but he's also getting ready to direct and star in "Help Me Spread Goodness," a drama about a banker who falls for a Nigerian e-mail scam.