Crabby, blackhearted Boris Yellnikoff (Larry David) and his sweet and gullible new friend Melodie St. Anne Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood) discuss the world in Whatever Works.

Sony Pictures Classics / Jessica Miglio

If a lot of Woody Allen’s latest film Whatever Works seems more than a little like the “old Woody Allen” — befuddled by the day-to-day stuff of life; unlucky at love and carping about just about everything he comes across; feeling that ultimately there is no point to what we do — it is probably because Whatever Works was written about the time Allen completed the script for Annie Hall in the mid 1970s.

Originally designed as a vehicle for Zero Mostel, the script for Whatever Works had sat around for three decades until Allen’s production schedule was thrown into disarray by the possibility of an actors strike. Hollywood rushed a slew of films into production last year in case members of the Screen Actors Guild were on the picket lines. Allen was not immune to the worry, although recently SAG agreed to settle without a strike. But at the time, Allen dusted off Whatever Works, added some contemporary touches, and put it before the cameras.

One can only wonder at this point if Allen has any more gems hidden away in some file cabinet. For Whatever Works works. And very well.

Allen directed, but is not in the film, having handed over the role Mostel would have played in the 1970s to Allen’s alter ego, Larry David, the star of the cable TV series Curb Your Enthusiasm. There are times when David so faithfully delivers his lines with Allen’s mannerisms that you’ll have to blink to see that it’s not Allen himself.

David is Boris Yellnikoff, a self-proclaimed “genius” who is weary and unhappy that the rest of the world cannot live up to his high standards. In Boris’s eyes, “everyone’s an idiot” … with the exception of himself, of course. In a funny monologue at the start of the film Boris describes other people as “greedy, selfish, shortsighted worms,” delivering his screed directly to the movie audience by looking into the camera lens to address us out there in the dark. Boris doesn’t put himself on a pedestal, however. He realizes his argumentative, insulting nature. “I’m not a likeable guy,” he admits. In a very funny scene we see him insulting a little girl to whom he is supposed to be teaching the fine points of chess.

But then he meets a pretty young blonde, Melodie St. Anne Celestine (a radiant Evan Rachel Wood), hiding under a pile of discarded cardboard near his apartment. She has run away from Mississippi for the bright lights of New York. Unexpectedly and uncharacteristically, Boris takes her up to his apartment — once he feels comfortable that she’s not going to pull a gun on him — and soon into his life. Bubbly and naïve (she believes Boris when he tells her he plays for the New York Yankees), Melodie brings a lilting melody into Boris’s crabby life … an antacid pill to calm the bile that usually spews from him. Soon they are the most unlikely of couples, unless you consider Allen himself and Soon-Yi Previn.

Boris, who walks with a limp because of a failed suicide attempt, had seemed an unrepentant pessimist who saw only the dark side of all things. Surprisingly, however, he begins to have a glimmer of hope that he may actually come to learn to enjoy life. As the days go by, he even ups the numbers he uses to rate Melodie to his friends, taking her from a 3 to an 8 and beyond.

More surprisingly, the susceptible Melodie turns out to be a sponge who begins picking up Boris’s blackhearted philosophy, even denying that there is a God, as he has taught her while debunking “corporate religion.”

Whatever Works is a fragile piece, however, a character study whose scale is tipped with the arrival of Melodie’s mother, Marietta (Patricia Clarkson), who at first believes her daughter has hooked up with the wrong guy before she even lays eyes on him. “He’s not a serial killer,” Melodie says hopefully. “At least he didn’t mention it.”

When Marietta finally does meet Boris, he turns out to be not at all the kind of man she’d pictured her daughter moving in with, and not the kind of man she wants her daughter moving in with. And Boris, rather than being captivated, immediately turns on Marietta, whom he considers a yahoo who is far beneath him. The daggers are out on both sides, with Clarkson striking back with a solid sense of comic timing that gives the movie a lot of fizz. In the midst of all this, it’s clear that Allen has a way of using words to turn the tables on everyone’s assumptions that is refreshing and quick witted.

An attempted suicide. A ménage a trois. The arrival of Melodie’s long-missing father (Ed Begley Jr.), who has his own surprising ideas about the kind of life he’d like to be living. An art gallery showing where old acquaintances are brought together and new acquaintances are met. A very happy New Year’s Eve. They all play into Allen’s attempts to put some hope into the bleakest of hearts. Whatever works, after all. And it does. You may well leave Whatever Works with a little extra spring in your step.

****Whatever Works

Starring: Larry David, Evan Rachel Wood, Patricia Clarkson, Ed Begley Jr., Michael McKean.

Rated: PG-13, contains adult themes, nudity.