There's no such thing as a romantic setting for a coming-of-age tale: The work of becoming a grown-up is so extraordinarily dismal that it doesn't matter if it's done in an upper-class suburb, a remote country village or a greasy little city distinguished only by row upon row of faceless clapboard houses.

That said, though, filmmakers often have trouble with the lower-middle-class experience of growing up. If there's a token monosyllabic father sitting on a ratty armchair in front of the tube, a can of Schlitz in his hand, they feel they've done their duty to signal the bleakness of working-class family life. It's as if the kid, or kids, in question hardly matter, as long as the all-important class distinction has been drawn in fat marker.

Michael Corrente's wonderful "Outside Providence" -- its script written by Corrente and Bobby and Peter Farrelly (directors of "Dumb & Dumber" and "There's Something About Mary"), from a novel by Peter Farrelly -- is about class, all right. But the movie is remarkable for the way it refuses to treat a lower-middle-class upbringing as a tragedy or as something to apologize for. Its lead character, hapless but good-hearted burnout Timothy Dunphy (Shawn Hatosy), doesn't see his place in the social food chain as a roadblock to overcome: It's simply there, an unremarkable fact. In an early sequence, Corrente shows us Timothy's younger brother, Jackie (Tommy Bone), in a wheelchair delivering papers; he's being pulled by Timothy, who's riding a bike, the two of them zipping past a row of those faceless clapboard houses, their three-legged German shepherd mutt (with an eyepatch, no less) ambling merrily in tow. Wheelchair, dismal dwellings, three-fourths of a dog: Corrente gives us this checklist right up front, so we'll know what we're in for. He wants us to laugh; what isn't welcome is our pity.

"Outside Providence" has a spiritual kinship with Tamara Jenkins' "Slums of Beverly Hills," although it's not nearly as cartoonish as that picture. It recognizes that the class a kid is born into has everything to do with how he or she grows up; it doesn't try to ameliorate class differences in the service of making some pat "Adolescence hurts, no matter how much money you've got" statement. And it does feature a father, played by Alec Baldwin, who slumps in front of the tube in a ratty armchair. But Baldwin's character, as broadly drawn as he is -- the movie is a comedy, after all -- isn't a token. None of the central characters, the rich ones included, have been plunked into the movie just to make a point. Maybe that's what gives "Outside Providence" a kind of richness that goes above and beyond its ostensibly depressing setting. It's funny and offbeat, sometimes raucous, but it still manages to come at you in gentle layers.

The '70s have turned out to be the most popular era covered in the movies lately, but Corrente transports us effortlessly not just into an era that's past, but into a whole way of life for kids of a certain age in a certain kind of town: Early on we see Timothy and his stoner buddies hanging out one night at a local water tower, talking about girls and drugs and not much else, in a way that's eminently not meaningful. You can't even say these kids' lives have a texture: Their days just seem to wash over them, culminating in these evening episodes where recent events are mined feebly as if they might have some potential meaning, or might be some means of effecting change -- but probably not. Change ends up grabbing Timothy by the scruff of the neck: Content enough to go through life getting high and helping his kid brother deliver papers, he gets into deep trouble when (high, of course) he crashes his father's car -- straight into a parked cop cruiser. "Old Man Dunphy" (Baldwin), hoping to straighten his kid out, manages to get him into a swanky prep school -- not realizing, of course, that by removing Timothy from his deadbeat gang, he's really just swapping one group of stoners for another. Timothy quickly finds his crowd at school (turns out the stoners of superior breeding have fashioned a giant bong out of some water tank-type thing), and he even manages to land Jane Weston (Amy Smart), an upper-crusty but marvelously down-to-earth young woman, as his girlfriend.

"Outside Providence" isn't your typical outsider's story. Timothy's class is barely an issue at Cornwall Academy (and no, it doesn't take long for some waggish youth to make the inevitable "cornhole" joke); actually, his bad grades and incessant partying mean that he fits right in. But there's still plenty for him to figure out. He needs to outwit a devious school house-master, Mr. Funderburk (Tim Crowe); his mother died when he was small, and his father talks about her so rarely that he doesn't understand the circumstances surrounding her death; and, embarrassed by having to wear a clip-on tie at school, he wants to learn how to tie a real one.

In its weird, winding way, "Outside Providence" gives each of those trials almost equal weight. Corrente's sure-footed direction, and the fact that his ensemble of actors uniformly know what they're doing, makes almost all of the movie's strange choices work. Hatosy, with his snaggle-tooth smile and droopy posture, is perfect as the kind of kid who's really only half a loser. He has no idea how to get by in the world, but because he has no idea that he has no idea, he jumps in anyway, undaunted. When he finds himself in the back seat of Jane Weston's rich-girl car -- her parents, starched and proper, are riding in the front -- there's a schoolboyish generosity in the way he hands her the Coke he's just bought for her. And the wicked half-smile of delight that creeps across Jane's face when she takes her first sip (Timothy has spiked both drinks) is just the first glimmer of Amy Smart's appeal as an actress. She ends up giving a completely charming and natural performance, knowing exactly how to show that a blond, beautiful, privileged co-ed can also be just really neat.

Baldwin's character, on the other hand, is part caricature. His working-class stubble and working-class accent are textbook. Even so, Baldwin digs beyond the obvious trappings of the role. You can see the sparkle of affection, and even pride, in his eyes when he tells his younger son, who's just made a clever joke, to "shut up, you little hard-on." Baldwin, Corrente and the Farrellys understand intuitively that in families, it's not necessarily the words spoken that make up the real language.

Baldwin taps his comic resources beautifully here, showing the kind of freewheeling ease that's always been apparent in his hilarious "Saturday Night Live" appearances. He's been almost uniformly stiff in his dramatic roles, but he's never been better than he is here, particularly in the scene where he shows Timothy how to knot his tie, outlining the process in a voice whose gruffness has given way to a kind of terse tenderness. The obvious connotation -- that he's initiating his son into adulthood -- isn't the point here. What's touching about the scene is that he's initiating Timothy into the league of gentlemen -- the unspoken but loud-and-clear subtext being that gentlemanliness can coexist with sloppy grammar and frayed shirt sleeves.

Although "Outside Providence" isn't a Farrelly Brothers vehicle in the strictest sense, it has their stamp all over it. (Peter Farrelly's novel, upon which the script was based, is semi-autobiographical.) "Dumb & Dumber," often waved about by smug would-be intellectuals as an example of lowest-common-denominator humor, isn't just hysterically funny. Underlying all those sublimely ridiculous jokes is an understanding of what it's like to live in a small crap town -- and an acknowledgment that it isn't necessarily as bad as it seems. When Jeff Daniels and Jim Carrey head out of Providence on I-95 in their hideous van, they pass a bunch of landmarks familiar to anyone who's ever had to drive that grim stretch of road, most notably a pest-control company with a giant purple bug perched on its roof. The Farrellys are perfectly aware of how dismal the territory is, but they show it with unbridled delight, a fairy tale highway dotted with smokestacks and nudie bars. To their characters, that patch of I-95, ugly as it is, represents the lure of the open road. Context, as the Farrellys know, is everything, and that's at least part of what makes "Outside Providence" work.

The movie does misstep occasionally. One sequence, in which Timothy explains in voice-over that he never wanted his little brother to feel sorry for himself because he's in a wheelchair, only reiterates in words what we've already been shown so well. But "Outside Providence" never lost me, from the minute I saw those kids hanging around listlessly at the water tower. The movie could easily mine nostalgia for its own sake, with its Badfinger songs and its bad haircuts, but it goes much further. It explains how you can take the boy out of the town -- but you can never, ever take the town out of the boy.