Jack Nicholson just turned 65, and in this subtle, morose comedy, he looks every minute of it and more. Indeed as the unbelievably cantankerous hero of About Schmidt, he fashions a study of failure, lower middle-class miasma and general old-gittery that’s enough to make Death Of A Salesman’s Willy Loman look like Richard Branson.

Having retired from his unrewarding lifelong duties as an actuarian, Warren Schmidt (Nicholson) prepares to settle into round-the-clock stifling domesticity with a wife who has made him sit down to piss for more than 30 years.

When he is suddenly widowed, he finds himself with even more freetime on his hands, and resolves to halt his ‘past her prime’ daughter’s (Davis) forthcoming nuptials to a balding, mullet-sporting waterbed salesman (Mulroney). This sets Schmidt off on a camper-van road trip around territory that represents not so much America’s heartlands as the sweaty folds around its ample midriff.

If you’re expecting the subsequent proceedings to provide the saccharine slosh or ‘I’m saved!’ denoument of As Good As It Gets, then you’ll be even more bitterly disappointed than Nicholson’s character. Equally refreshing is the restrained axe-free performance Jack turns in, easily his most understated since Five Easy Pieces.

However, About Schmidt is most impressive as an anti-road movie. Nicholson’s unromantic trip, replete with shoe-salesmen and figurine collections is hardly the stuff of Kerouac, and the only whiff of manifest destiny is provided by the gaudy exhibits in the uber-tacky pioneer theme parks.

Undoubtedly then, writer/director Payne has followed up his spiky 1999 debut Election, with a quiet, effective and highly impressive work.