In the last four years, director and producer Judd Apatow has built a potent brand around a crew of familiar faces and a sensibility that dodges cliché while managing to marry dick jokes with heart. As a writer and director, he helmed The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, comedies with honest dramatic sentiment, but in Funny People he’s tried to break the mould with a heartfelt drama that isn’t averse to jokes about penis size. The result is an uneven mix that tries to tackle some serious adult questions, but ends up feeling too much like the hybrid it is.

As a struggling standup comedian, Ira (Seth Rogen) catches a potentially career-making break when superstar comedian George Simmons (played by and at least partially based on Adam Sandler) taps him as an assistant. Struggling with a rare form of leukemia, Simmons begins to depend on Ira to get his life back in order, from selling off cars to charity to scheduling the montage of reconciliations that serves as the movie’s mid-point.

As much about Ira’s developing confidence as a performer and human being as it is about Simmons’s attempt to find happiness in an adult life littered with his past choices, Funny People is a story that isn’t always driven in a neat, single direction. While this scope feels like a sincere play at the vagaries of life, it also leads to plotting issues that could be solved by the clichés that Apatow so strenuously avoids.

A collection of subplots litter Funny People like dropped punchlines. A romantic interest introduced for Ira plays with romantic convention — a fight before their first date feels about a month too early — but it’s completely tangential to Ira’s more satisfying development as a comedian. An often-repeated point about Simmons’s need for fatherly approval gets only the barest nod of a resolution. Montages often stand in for some of the more important transitions.

But it’s the third act, which dives into Simmons’s past, that most notably goes too deep for the relatively minor payoff it produces. In the script of a writer less concerned with finding the comedy in reality, Simmons’s trip to the home of the former love of his life (Leslie Mann) would be a slight, gag-filled bit of tragicomic business à la Meet the Parents. In Apatow’s, it becomes a deceivingly involved domestic situation, a red herring still well worth it for inverting one tried-and-true Hollywood answer to a mid-life crisis.

Funny People is a commendable film, filled with dick jokes in addition to the recognizable ambiguities of adult life. Apatow has a sympathetic eye for his subjects and the comedy of their failings, but ultimately his direction isn’t enough to lead a clear path through all of the film’s sincere digressions. Unlike life’s existential confusion, it isn’t too much to ask for a clearer path through Funny People. Just like life, though, it’s still worth the time.