Actors sometimes talk about their careers in terms of one for them, one for me.

One movie is for the audience. Big studio, big marketing budget, recognizable premise, hopefully a big box office return. Then they make one for themselves—something smaller, maybe less commercial. A movie they want to make because they like the script, the director, the other actors or simply think it would be fun.

She’s Funny That Way feels almost exactly like one of those movies. It opened in just 27 theaters in the U.S. and made only about $112,000 domestically. Even worldwide, it finished at roughly $6 million.

This was not a movie built to take over the multiplex.

But look at the cast: Owen Wilson. Jennifer Aniston. Kathryn Hahn. Will Forte. This is not a collection of people who needed to take whatever job came along, and yet there’s a decent chance you’ve never even heard of it.

That’s a shame, because She’s Funny That Way isn’t some inaccessible arthouse movie where everybody stares silently through windows for six minutes while you wonder whether you’re sophisticated enough to understand what’s happening.

That’s not really my beat anyway.

This is a comedy, and a genuinely clever one.

Imogen Poots plays Izzy, a young woman working as an escort in New York who gets hired by Arnold, a Broadway director played by Owen Wilson. Arnold has a habit of offering women money to leave the business and pursue whatever dream they actually have. Izzy wants to act, so he gives her the money.

That would probably be the end of the story if Izzy didn’t shortly thereafter walk into an audition for the Broadway play Arnold is directing. And if Arnold’s wife weren’t starring in it. And if the playwright didn’t immediately become interested in Izzy. And if several other people involved weren’t already sleeping with, dating, treating or lying to several of the other people involved.

You get the idea.

The movie spends the next hour and a half tightening the knot. People walk into rooms at exactly the wrong moment. Someone knows somebody they absolutely should not know. A conversation that would be completely harmless under normal circumstances suddenly becomes a disaster because of who happens to be standing ten feet away.

That’s harder to pull off than it looks, and the cast is really good at it. But Imogen Poots is the one who stands out.

She sits right in the middle of all this nonsense without becoming just another eccentric character in an already crowded movie. She’s funny, charming and just offbeat enough that Izzy feels completely at home in this increasingly ridiculous world.

Maybe that’s part of what makes She’s Funny That Way feel like a “one for me” movie. It feels like a bunch of talented people found a script they liked, enjoyed the people they were working with and decided to make something a little smaller and a little less obvious.

That doesn’t guarantee a good movie.

In this case, it worked.

Maybe they made this one for themselves, but more of us should have seen it.