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Frances Ha (2013) is directed by Noah Baumbach, but the film belongs entirely to Greta Gerwig.

Gerwig — who co-wrote the script and stars in the black-and-white, 86-minute IFC flick — acts as the gravitational center of a hypnotizing slow-paced plot about a 27-year-old dancer trying to find a place to live. The story plucks along quietly as Gerwig moves from apartment to apartment in New York City, navigating relationships of all kinds along the way. Frances Ha serves as a premonition of Gerwig’s Oscar nominated directorial debut, 2017’s Lady Bird — both movies consisting of tiny moments of reality strung seamlessly on a thread, rather than a series of dramatic big screen encounters.

Instead of allowing this tone to let the script lag, the naturalistic style makes a short film feel even quicker. It plays more like a conversation the viewer is eavesdropping on than a theatrical release.

For how soft-spoken it is, Frances Ha covers a lot of ground. It’s a coming-of-age story, a big-city story, a starving-artist story. But mostly, it’s a story about love in friendship — weddings and break-ups are glossed over while the platonic bonds between Frances (Gerwig) and her rotating gang are examined in-depth. The movie looks at love in an uncommon cinematic sense, treating a reliable friendship with as much weight and care as most films do romantic passion.

“It’s that thing when you’re with someone, and you love them and they know it, and they love you and you know it but it’s a party and you’re both talking to other people, and you’re laughing and shining and you look across the room and catch each other’s eyes but — but not because you’re possessive, or it’s precisely sexual, but because that is your person in this life,” monologues Frances, wine-drunk in the film’s most on-the-nose attempt at purpose.

Frances and her best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner) deftly convey the subtle moments that form between close friends. When Sophie wants to move out of the pair’s apartment, she notes that she and her new roommate are “both really clean.” Without missing a beat, Frances responds that she’s “busy.” A disjointed conversation from an outside perspective, but within the context of a cemented relationship it is clearly Frances’ routine defense of her disorderliness.

It’s those small moments that make Frances Ha so digestible — the viewer is in on the jokes. I come back to it when something new sounds like too much effort. It’s easy because it feels familiar, even on first viewing.

Blaring interludes from the soundtrack counter quiet dialogue throughout, whisking the audience off to Frances’ next destination. Moments of non-diegetic silence lend to the sense that this is a movie about people fumbling through real life, rather than characters on a screen. Gerwig’s performance compounds this. Her style feels a little blunt, a little overstated, but rather than coming across as cringy exaggeration, she portrays an awkward, sympathetic, real person who just can’t get her timing right.

As with Lady Bird, to come four years after, Frances Ha is a subtle story about the way people interact with each other. Near the film’s end, when Frances and an inebriated Sophie unload months of unspoken feelings to each other at a chance meeting, Sophie confesses she’s been unhappy, despite posts on her travel blog that make her seem the opposite. “I don’t think my mom would read it if it were about depression,” she says in the sort of admission that comes only in a dark, drunk moment with a best friend, rather than over a well-lit romantic dinner or family gathering. The banter there is Frances Ha at its best — as a demonstration of everyday lies and truths, and the winding route life takes as we come to know and forget the people who make it up.

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