Note to teens: You have no monopoly on angst

Mike Binder’s film “The Upside of Anger” is hardly perfect. But at least it’s nice to watch a film that is aimed at an adult audience. And Binder gives Joan Allen a chance to show a range of acting talent that has up until now been hinted at but kept mostly hidden.

Allen plays a woman who wakes up one day to find that she has been deserted by her husband. And her way of caring for her four daughters (the main one played by Evan Wood Rachel ) involves bitching at them while diving into a vodka bottle. Her ongoing self pity and bitterness causes an ongoing rift between her and her girls, especially the one who is graduating from college ( Alicia Witt ) and the one with an obvious eating disorder who wants to become a dancer ( Keri Russell ).

And while Allen’s dark attitude only moderately puts off a rumpled neighbor, a rumpled Kevin Costner playing an ex-major-league-baseball-player-turned-radio-personality, it gradually begins to wear on him, too (in fact, one of the film’s best scenes involves Costner’s character finally losing his anger).

The problems with “The Upside of Anger” are several. It has more than one cliched scene (Allen and Costner hold up traffic at a neighborhood intersection). Allen’s continual sense of bitterness is enough to make the Wicked Witch of the West seem like Oprah Winfrey. And then there’s the film’s not-too-credible climax, which would seem to have been something someone might have considered.

None of the problems, though, cover up the film’s one enduring strength: the acting. Especially good are Wood (who first attracted attention with her powerful performance in 2003’s “thirteen,” ) and Costner (who hasn’t been this since 1988’s “Bull Durham” and maybe ever). But the key performance is pulled off by Allen who, though playing a complete bitch on wheels, never lets us forget that behind all that bitterness is a woman desperately trying to make sense out of the incomprehensible.

That’s a feeling that, yes, we adults have trouble coping with, too.