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In “Between the Temples,” the latest and so far biggest film from indie director Nathan Silver, Jason Schwartzman plays a Reform cantor who can no longer sing.

Since the death of his wife, Cantor Ben Gottlieb has been in a deep and increasingly dark funk. At his first Shabbat back on the bimah, unable to start singing, he runs from the synagogue with his tallit still on and lays down in a busy road, waiting to be run over. When an 18-wheeler stops short, he shouts “Keep going!”

“Between the Temples” is a grimly comedic depiction of a man in the throes of a crisis of faith, searching for something new to wake himself back up. In a dive bar, he encounters his grade-school music teacher, Carla Kessler, played perfectly by screen legend Carol Kane. They strike up an odd but warm friendship as she studies with him for a much belated bat mitzvah.

The film is a keenly observed, sideways look at suburban Judaism — from family life and dating dynamics to synagogue politics.

In one scene, he attempts to quit his job, but the rabbi refuses. “You should fire me. I would fire me,” Gottlieb says. “We’re not going to fire you,” replies the rabbi. Gottlieb: “Because my moms are big donors to the temple?” Rabbi: “That is not a small consideration.”

This is Silver’s ninth feature film. But “Between the Temples” is the biggest budget he’s ever worked with, it has the biggest stars — and now it’s been picked up for a proper theatrical run by Sony Pictures Classics. It’s screening widely throughout the Bay Area and Northern California.

I spoke with the director last month while he was at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

J.: This movie is centered around the staff and members of a painfully, awkwardly real depiction of a suburban Reform synagogue. At one point there’s a bake sale for a Holocaust Torah, which is so funny to me — but it also feels like something that our publication could have written an article about in real life. Is this fictional temple a kind of setting you’ve spent a lot of time in?

Nathan Silver: No. I grew up just culturally Jewish. I was obsessed with Albert Brooks, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen. My father had been bar mitzvahed, but he hated Hebrew school and didn’t want me to go through it. My mother grew up in a socialist household and didn’t want me to go to temple. So my attachment to Judaism was just the humor and the culture.

We did a lot of research for this film and we spoke to a rabbi and we had a Jewish consultant on the movie. My parents actually now belong to a temple and we shot the temple scenes there. We found they had at one point done a fundraiser for the Holocaust Torah scroll.

The more we spoke to people, the more we found out about the day-to-day of being a cantor or a rabbi and dealing with the community and dealing with fundraising and these things that are outside of the spiritual aspects of it all. Like any enterprise, you have to keep the lights on.

In the New York Times, you said “filmmaking is an undertaking where ‘everything is always falling apart at all times.’” It sounds like not just a description of filmmaking but of what you want to make films about — people who are falling apart, situations that are falling apart.

That’s right. I think that’s why I fell into this industry. It reflects something of my personality. It’s chaotic. Movies are always on the verge of not happening. There are a lot of humans involved, and when there are a lot of humans there’s a lot of conflict. Whatever insanity I was born with means I relish in that. I love being around people and I love the circus of it all. And then I find stories about chaotic people, people who are on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

This film has an incredible cast. Jason Schwartzman exudes a neurotic Ashkenazi-ness in any role, but it’s one his most explicitly Jewish roles so far. Carol Kane, of course, is also an iconically Jewish actor. How do you get your script into their hands?

The way Chris [Mason Wells] and I wrote the movie, we wrote it for Jason. And it just so happens that my friend who officiated my wedding had worked with Jason on “Asteroid City,” so they’d spent time together and they have a similar sense of humor. When we had the script ready to go, he told Jason that “you would laugh together,” and Jason listened to that and read it and eventually we had a Zoom and we stayed on Zoom for two hours. We just hit it off.

After we had locked him in, we were trying to figure out who would play Carla’s character. I was on my honeymoon and I had Covid and I woke up from a feverish sleep and I was like, “It has to be Carol Kane!” It turned out that Carol has always loved Jason’s work and wanted to work with him, so through that, it was just luck. I can’t imagine the movie without her. It couldn’t be played by anyone else.

In one scene, Ben goes to a Catholic church in search of answers and talks with a priest. In another, he seems to actually get some spiritual solace from an accidental encounter with some psychedelic tea. What is it that he can’t find in Judaism?

I think he feels let down by it in some ways. He’s part of this institution, this synagogue, where it’s much more about the politics within the synagogue than the spirituality of it all. And it’s his place of work, so he’s seeking spiritual satisfaction elsewhere. And through circumstances in his life, he’s at a crossroads and that’s forcing him to question his faith.

How have non-Jewish audiences reacted to it since its premiere at Sundance in January? It’s a very Jewish film, in a much more explicit way than a lot of Jew-ish movies that come more out of Hollywood. 

They’ve been very oddly positive. When we played Sundance, Berlin, Tribeca … it’s been odd because the non-Jews see something beyond it; they’re fascinated by the aspects of the ritual and so on, but it’s more about what these characters are going through, and Judaism is the backdrop of it all. I’ve been pleasantly surprised that it hasn’t been pigeonholed as just “a Jewish movie that I can’t relate to.”

And there’s something about American culture that has always gravitated toward Woody Allen, Seinfeld — that Jewish sense of humor, that Jewish sensibility. It transcends whatever culture you’re in or raised in, because it’s about questioning the absurdity of life. Why are we this way? We’re absurd — and as we try and answer all these absurd, sort of Talmudic questions and questions about life, we have to learn to laugh, because there are no answers.