Starring Paul Giamatti and Dustin Hoffman. Rated PG. Opens Friday, January 14, at the Fifth Avenue Cinemas

Paul Giamatti gets to play the schlub of a lifetime in Barney's Version—and that's saying something after his roles as the anticharismatic naysayers in Cold Souls, Sideways, and American Splendor. The chin-challenged performer swings more confidently here as the title character in this adaptation of Mordecai Richler's last novel. He has to, because there's no other way to sell the charms of this noxious self-regarder who plows through an unlikely number of marriages to very different hotties.

This type is common currency in the novels of postwar writers like Richler, Norman Mailer, and Philip Roth. But being monologic (not monogamous) projections of their authors' ids, they are difficult to bring believably to life—especially now that their macho-egghead views of sex and booze are so long out of fashion. Here, in the hands of Whale Music director Richard J. Lewis (working with a script by Michael Konyves), Giamatti is helped immensely by the presence of Dustin Hoffman as his comically brazen dad. Their awkwardly intimate relationship conveys the shift, in one generation, from immigrant cop to successful, therefore neurotic, television producer.

Actually, the TV side of Barney Panofsky's life—meant to give us something extra about Montreal's cultural life apart from Jewish strivers and WASP dropouts—is the least convincing aspect of the time-jumping film. His friendship with a druggy pal (Scott Speedman) is similarly muddy. The funniest part is our bearded boy's Duddy Kravitz–like pursuit of a rich man's princess; everyone else can see what a nightmare she'll be, but Minnie Driver makes you enjoy every twinge of her bug-nutty ball-breaking. Also effective, especially considering her youth, is Rosamund Pike as a woman much closer to Barney's notion of refined culture and beauty—for all the good it does her.

Even though our self-destructive hero finally ages and starts forgetting things, you'll probably find yourself recalling this appropriately messy memoir and smiling.