Nicole Kidman stars in "Margot at the Wedding."

Finally, the role Nicole Kidman was born to play.

In "Margot at the Wedding" Kidman plays the title character, a pale narcissist who heads back home for her sister Pauline's (Jennifer Jason Leigh) wedding and finds a mess that she, of course, must clean up.

Margot is in many ways a loathsome creature, who has a knack for insulting people and projecting her character flaws (and her resultant feelings about those flaws) onto whomever is around, be it her pubescent son (Zane Pais), her husband (John Turturro), her sister, her soon-to-be brother-in-law (Jack Black), or her lover (Ciaran Hinds).

She desperately hopes to talk her sister out of marrying this man who she clearly sees as unfit for her. Black's Malcolm is an "artist" whose peak was playing onstage with Ric Ocasek (after he left The Cars), and has a mustache that's "meant to be funny." He also has an volatile temper

Kidman is outstandingly low-key, playing Margot as insufferable and introverted, capable of bold rudeness and abject insensitivity. Even her son, on whom she dotes (but won't let learn to swim or wear underarm deodorant) but is at times blankly cruel to.

Black and Leigh are also outstanding, as is Turturro in a smaller role.

Director Noah Baumbach ("The Squid and the Whale") still manages to milk a little pathos out of Margot. She's insecure and frightened by a world she thinks she knows, and she has no idea how to connect with her son, who is starting to discover girls.

He gets the details right, and it's the offbeat minutia that in many ways makes the film.

It all results in a touching, maddening, laugh-or-you'll-cry sort of film whose overarching message is that the world may be screwed up, but it's not as screwed up as the people who are being screwed up by the screwed-up world.