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The Wedding Crashers and The 40-Year Old Virgin are two of 2005’s most pleasurable American comedies, and they deserve their popularity. The third comedy of merit, Andrew Wagner’s The Talent Given Us, my favorite of all this year, has languished in deep limbo since premiering last January at Sundance. It’s failed to find a distributor, and the Kendall Square Cinema knocked it off its fall schedule. I’m happy to see that the MFA has arranged for a run (December 14, 18, 22-24, 28-30) of this hilarious, endearing, and occasionally heartbreaking shaggy-dog road movie.

The Talent Given Us is an all-star family production, "the aristocrats" (the joke) with the loony, obsessive, inbred cast but without the wall-to-wall sex. Filmmaker Wagner, a high-school teacher and also a frustrated, semi-failed screenwriter residing in LA, persuaded his wife to let him take their savings for a down payment on a home and self-finance this intensely personal movie. Wagner wrote, directed, photographed, and edited it in his living room, but the cast came cheap. Courageously playing blighted, manic, wounded (and fictive?) versions of themselves are Andrew’s 60ish mother and father and his 30ish sisters. They’re all sublime on screen, very funny, startlingly open. How did they allow Andrew to film them at the most fragile, fractious moments? What’s the last time you saw a filmmaker with camera in bed with his parents as his naked father pushes his mother’s head lower and lower? (Don’t worry: there’s a cutaway!)

The film begins on Manhattan’s West Side, the middle-class Jewish residency of the parents, Allen and Judy Wagner. Allen, an overweight rhino, huffs and wobbles all the way to doctors’ appointments, his conversation an incomprehensible plug of phlegm, a plastic straw (for suction?) planted in his cheek like a lollipop. He’s become incontinent and impotent from an overload of medicines, and Judy doesn’t like it. She sits home doing crossword puzzles, sometimes feeling for Allen, other times raging and fuming. "I missed the mark in my life," she declares.

On a impulse, Judy persuades Allen to drive across country to see Andrew, as if visiting their son might make life right. They bring along their adult daughters, the vaguely normal Maggie and the absurdly cuckoo Emily, whose decade-long thespian career as a background character on ER (true!) doesn’t obviate the necessity of four-times-a-week shrink appointments. "I’m a compulsive masturbator because you wouldn’t pick me up as a kid," she tells her mother.

And away they go! California, here they come!

What’s the serious stuff? Judy is forever angry because, many moons ago, Allen apparently had an affair, though he still denies it. Now she’s contemplating a divorce to salvage her last years, and Allen is in denial about that, too. Should she or shouldn’t she leave her husband? All good road movies are ultimately about self-discovery, and in LA, city of self-help, all kinds of answers are proposed. And son Andrew? He’s MIA: nobody has seen him for weeks and weeks.

The self-reflexive irony, of course, is that while the Wagner family is desperately seeking him, he’s been there all the time, standing quietly behind the camera. And Judy and Allen? After 45 years of passing each other, maybe, with the talent given them, they too can look up and see, and confess a screwy kind of semi-happiness.