Between the cunning classroom satire of Election, the inverted manifest destiny fable About Schmidt and the delightfully perverse Citizen Ruth, it’s been evident for quite some time now that Alexander Payne is one wickedly smart writer and director. It transpires he’s been holding out. Universally rapturous notices have dubbed Mr. Payne’s Sideways as this year’s boy’s own Lost In Translation, and for once this lazy-assed labelling has considerable justification. Craftily low-key, tartly bittersweet and divinely arch, Sideways is surely a lock for official Unlikely Hip Movie Of Zero Five, but unlikely is something of a speciality with this filmmaker.

It seems incredibly unlikely, for example, that anyone would care less about Paul Giamatti’s anti-hero, a tosser of quite staggering proportions. Dissatisfied teacher, epic wine snob, failed novelist, failed husband, he’s an absolute car-crash with a predilection for (gulp) golf, Barely Legal and self-loathing Eeyore-isms. From a distance, his picturesque tour of Californian wine country with Thomas Hayden Church’s has-been actor ought to be a damning depiction of male menopausal meltdown. And in some ways, it’s just that.

Our unpublished writer’s travelling companion is certainly acutely alert to the faintest possibility of pussy. With mere days before his scheduled wedding, Mr. Church is out to nail anything in a skirt. Even fat chicks, as he sagely points out, carry the advantage of being grateful afterwards. Mostly though, he’s concerned with Sandra Oh’s feisty free-spirit, though he conveniently neglects to mention his forthcoming nuptials.

Okay, so one hardly needs to journey to the cinema to hang out with desperate lushes, but this gang are not without their charms. Like Whit Stillman, Payne gives his characters the space to be obnoxious and selfish, understanding that therein lies their comedic potential and aching humanity. Paul Giamatti, an actor with the hang-dog melancholy of Gerard Houllier exiled to the stands of Anfield, somehow contrives to improve on his terrific turn in last year’s American Splendor.

Like Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt, Payne attends to the minutiae of the character, lingering as Giamatti clips his toenails and holds his permanently hungover head in his hands. Ultimately, we’re just too intimately involved with him and his foibles not to care deeply. It’s a neat trick, it really is – and if you miss watching this curmudgeon getting locked and loaded, you’ll miss the year’s first cartwheel-out-the-cinema (and preferably into the nearest pub) experience.

127mins. Cert 15pg. Opens January 28th.