The co-stars of the literally-named film Martian Child, Amanda Peet and John Cusack, were supposed to have arrived at 5:45 for their snaps, but even at 7:00 they were still on the wet road. Spirits remained high, though, and by the time Ms. Peet showed up, a good old fashioned buzz filled the room.

Ms. Peet, shockingly lovely and delicate in person, gamely made her way down the line, wearing a leopard-print patterned dress and open-toed shoes -- that didn't look wet at all! But after she passed the flashbulbs she flopped, exhausted looking, on a nearby bench and pulled out her cell phone, not looking particularly pleased as the gaggle of publicists around her kept her up to date on Mr. Cusack's progress. Apparently Mr. Cusack's car was trapped in the same miserable traffic as everyone else's (Stars! They're Just Like Us!).

"Ten minutes," a harried-looking girl assured Ms. Peet. "He just has to stop by the hotel and change his clothes." Before Mr. Cusack could show, though, another distinguished gent arrived. Phil Donahue! "Oh my god, is that really Phil Donahue?" asked one of Ms. Peet's companions, neck craning. In case anyone wondered, Mr. Donahue looks fantastic, and his voice, still recognizable after all these years, simply booms. Mr. Donahue was at the festival to promote Body of War, an Iraq documentary that he co-wrote and co-directed, with the help of money (and music!) from Eddie Vedder, and Sean Penn as well.

Ms. Peet looked unimpressed with the scrum around Mr. Donahue, but when the shockingly-tall Mr. Cusack did arrive, she kindled and took back her place on the red carpet to flash her megawatt grin.

In past years, the Hamptons Film Festival's Friday night is filled with mellow celebrity-filled parties. Due to weather and traffic stress, however, by 10:30 East Hampton looked like any other beach town in October, slick empty roads and deserted restaurants and bars. The scene apparently was at Nick & Toni's, where New Line was celebrating Martian Child. But a mellower crowd congregated at the Hampton Bowl, where old-school publicity man Jeremy Walker threw a midnight bowling party. There was a strobe light, Def Leppard on the stereo and many pitchers of beer. But not-so-much star power (save for Jamie Johnson, director of Born Rich, who stuck to bowling over socializing). Phil Donahue didn't show -- apparently he was pissed off at the weather causing the evening's screenings to be anemic.

When the day broke it was sunny and the fall colors were peaking, and by 11:15 people were already buzzing around the theater. Chris Eigeman's Turn the River was screening, and star Famke Janssen, in low-slung tan slacks and a peasant blouse, was hanging around with her little dog, looking effortlessly hot. Alec Baldwin was taking in a showing of I Am Animal, a documentary about PETA (is he a veg, too?) and tickets traffic in and out of the theater seemed to be picking up.

Best known for his clean-shaven, uptight leading roles in Whit Stillman’s trilogy of films about young urban angst among the privileged class (Metropolitan, Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco) as well as Noah Baumbach’s pre-Squid and the Whale work (Kicking and Screaming, Mr. Jealousy), the goateed, relaxed Mr. Eigeman hasn’t spent much time with kids. He only played a dad once on screen, in a small film called Clipping Adam, and isn’t terribly eager to again. (On being offered such parts: “‘Oh, really … the dad?’ I don’t want to play the dad. The dull dad. Or, like, the really mean dad?”) But he has written and directed his first feature film, Turn the River, which will premiere Friday at the Hamptons Film Festival. And making a movie feels, he imagines, about the same as having a baby.

“The affection you have for [the film] has to be the same as the affection you have for one of your kids,” Mr. Eigeman hypothesized, his gray-blue eyes serious, gray-white glinting in his beard. He was certainly dressed for Dad-dom, in loose light blue jeans and a neat white Oxford cloth shirt with a pen in the pocket. “You don’t want to see it manhandled. You don’t want anybody to say anything nasty about it, not even behind your back. When you’re in a film, you have that, but I think to a lesser degree. Here I have very little cover.”

Turn the River is gooey stuff for a guy who’s made his career playing the smartest asshole in the room. It’s the story of a pool-hustling woman named Kailey (played by Mr. Eigeman’s good friend Famke Janssen, the Dutch former model and Jean Grey from the X-Men franchise, whom he met on the set of indie flick The Treatment), who’s trying to win enough money on the table to make a life for herself and her estranged son, Gulley. (Incidentally, Gulley is also the name of the Eigemans’ beloved white German Shepherd, who himself was named after the main character in Mr. Eigeman’s favorite book, The Horse’s Mouth by Joyce Cary. And no, he won’t be naming his actual son Gulley.) In Turn the River, Gulley lives with his dad and stepmother in Manhattan, but sneaks off in secret to meet his mother; the two exchange letters like clandestine lovers via an old friend of Kailey’s.

Perhaps you were expecting that fourth Whit Stillman movie that Whit Stillman hasn’t gotten around to making? Or a Kicking and Screaming for our midlife crises instead of our postgrad rut? Mr. Eigeman’s onscreen persona is so ingrained in the minds of a certain generation (the one currently dominating Brooklyn and East Village streets with banded left hands and baby strollers) that it was hard not to assume that all these years—from his debut as WASP-y Nick Smith in Metropolitan to his turn on Gilmore Girls as a witty, neurotic insurance executive named Digger—we were seeing Chris Eigeman there on the screen, not a character he was hired to portray. He was the crush of choice for every girl who ever, even for a second, dreamed of being Parker Posey.

Sitting in his neatly manicured backyard, Mr. Eigeman is as erudite and quick with a joke as any fan would expect. When this reporter arrived, he was reading The New York Press, wide-eyed over that story about New York Times reporter Deborah Solomon and her questionable interview methods. He dropped references to bands like the National and Arcade Fire as naturally as any 25-year old. He’s hip to the World Wide Web.

But Turn the River reveals a side of Mr. Eigeman that only those close to him know. “Chris is the kind of person who cries really easily, so I wasn’t surprised at all by the sensitivity of Turn the River,” said Mr. Baumbach via phone from the Mill Valley Film Festival in California (lordy, what’s next—a fest on the Moon?), adding that even a political newspaper story can turn his pal misty. Mr. Baumbach, who has remained close to Mr. Eigeman since casting him in Kicking and Screaming more than 10 years ago, shared some of the equipment he used for his upcoming film Margot at the Wedding with Mr. Eigeman, whose movie was made for less than a million dollars and shot around New York City in just 21 days.

Some elements of Turn the River, which takes its name from two poker terms, are straight-up autobiographical—the split-up parents, the gambling and game playing. “My mom and dad got divorced, so it was one of those things where Sundays I’d go to dad’s apartment, and this was, say 1970-whatever, and it had a pool table on the top floor in a very traditional kind of divorced-dad apartment building,” said Mr. Eigeman, who grew up in Denver, Colorado, attending the Putney boarding school in Vermont. “It was just the sort of thing where we could play pool together and we could talk about the Broncos. And that was pretty much it.”

Later on, he found a worthy competitor in his now-wife, Linda, 42, against whom he’s been shooting pool since they met at Kenyon College. (Yes, except for a brief breakup followed by “a very long letter-writing campaign on both of our parts that I don’t think could happen today in the land of e-mail” they have been together that long. And to think, most of his characters could barely even date!) The two would play eight ball in halls near Gambier, Ohio, and later, once they moved to New York in the late 1980’s, at Julian’s, on 14th street, and Chelsea Billiards. The Eigemans have a pool table now in their upstate farmhouse, near Hudson. (It wouldn’t fit in their parlor floor brownstone apartment.)

“We’d play these first-to-200-wins—whoever wins 200 games could ask for whatever they wanted,” Mr. Eigeman said. “And she won the first one and I won the second and asked for a night at the Algonquin, and that’s where I asked her to marry me.” (Heart palpitations!) The actor-director has his wedding anniversary inscribed on the inside of his wedding band. “I was told to do this—it’s a very good idea,” he said sagely. Their 14th anniversary was earlier this month.

Before New York, the Eigemans did a brief stint in England. “I was going to be in an acting school in London and then I promptly got thrown out of an acting school in London,” he said. “Well, it wasn’t that I got thrown out as much as I was not invited back, which is the same thing, just more polite.”

Back on this side of the pond, Linda interned at CNN (she still works there, as a senior producer) while Mr. Eigeman parked cars at the River Cafe. (They’ve been in Brooklyn pretty much ever since; his neighbors include actor Gabriel Byrne and the novelist Arthur Phillips, with whom he frequently lunches.) Back then, he’d occasionally gamble away his night’s earnings—“I could lose a couple hundred dollars a night, and that was all I made the night before,” he said. “So it was like a zero-sum game. I lost everything.” Needless to say, Mr. Eigeman doesn’t gamble any more.

He is most frequently recognized for having played Max in Kicking and Screaming. His favorite “fan” story involves a fellow restaurant patron visiting his table and putting down a scrap of paper that read “Broken Glass,” an homage to a scene in Mr. Baumbach’s film when Max sees a pile of broken glass on the floor and puts a piece of paper over it saying “Broken Glass” instead of cleaning it up. “I was like, ‘That’s fantastic.’ It’s a huge compliment, it’s also very clever, it’s everything you want,” he said.

But nearly every role Mr. Eigeman has played has echoed his very first as Nick Smith in Metropolitan, which went on to earn an Oscar nomination for Mr. Stillman for best original screenplay.

“EVERYBODY SHOULD BE SO LUCKY that that would be their first film,” said Mr. Eigeman, who got the part after answering an ad in Backstage magazine. “Because it in a way was so extreme, it was really like acting, you were really swinging for the fences all the time. I’m not sure if I would have the balls to do that now. The bravery of ignorance is spectacular. But also you had to think like, this was 1990-whatever, one or two or something. Film was really happily sexual, dark. Sex, Lies and Videotape. Even Eating Raoul. … I was like, C’mon, this [Metropolitan] is crazy! And you know, it gives you brain freeze because you’re like, ‘I am going to do a 14-page monologue about collars and cummerbunds.’”

Speaking by phone from his home in Paris, Mr. Stillman said that Mr. Eigeman was “impressive right from the start.” He cast him as the lead in his next two films, despite the fact that by the time they made The Last Days of Disco in 1998, they were “under a lot of pressure not to work together again. People were worried about typecasting, and that he would be too associated with my films.” Disco’s producers wanted a star in the role of Des, the sleazy nightclub manager who breaks up with girls by telling them he might be gay. Mr. Stillman insisted, however, on Mr. Eigeman. “Chris was just so much better than anyone else,” he said.

Mr. Stillman suggested that possibly “the roles he’s played in my films do him a disservice, a bit.” But Mr. Eigeman begged to differ. In fact, he seemed downright content with his whole freaking life. “I’ve been really, really, really lucky because I’ve worked with some incredible directors and I did some films that people can look back on and think, ‘Oh that was a good film and that was of the time,’” he said.

And unlike his characters, he’s not afraid to grow up. Well, maybe.

“Even though I am in my mid-40’s I live like I am in my mid-20’s,” Mr. Eigeman said. “Like, if you turn the sound off, I don’t think there would be any real difference from my mid-20’s to my mid-40’s, and that’s all about to change.”

It was 1999, and I stood on the Charles Bridge and went to one of Kafka’s houses and drank the coffee and the beer (both of which were better over there, truly). And I thought it would cure me of my obsession with the movie Kicking & Screaming, Noah Baumbach’s first film, released in 1995. I thought I would be vaccinated in the truest sense—given a gluttony of the very thing I hoped to avoid. It didn’t work.

When the Criterion Collection released the film on DVD last year, I tried again. I watched it over and over. In the end, all it got me was my VCR in the trash. The VHS-only version of Kicking & Screaming was the only reason I had held onto it for so long.

I wish there were something or someone—an empiricist philosopher, a great short novelist—that I quoted more. But it’s a movie that permeates my conversations. And I’m not alone. In fact, I would be remiss in continuing here without mentioning Matt Feeney’s 2005 piece for Slate, in which he used the release of The Squid and the Whale to herald Mr. Baumbach’s unapologetically emotional early work (Mr. Jealousy and Kicking and Screaming). The difference, I suspect, between Mr. Feeney and myself is that I’m pretty sure he leads a functional life. I can barely make it though a week without referencing baked potatoes and TV weathermen.

First, let me explain the Prague thing. “Oh, I’ve been … ” is one of the more heavily quoted lines in this cult film, dropped at a college graduation party in which Jane (Olivia d’Abo) breaks up with her boyfriend, fellow aspiring writer Grover (Josh Hamilton). Jane is the one who goes off to Prague (“Division One Bratislava,” mind you), but the line belongs to Grover—who has, of course, never been. He is left to sort out the perils of post-graduation life with his friends. One of them re-enrolls in college; another lives with his mother and gets a job at Video Planet. If a “plot” is the driving force behind a sequence of events, Kicking and Screaming doesn’t have much of an engine. At one point, Grover’s friend Max (Chris Eigeman) says, on a stroll across campus: “I caught myself writing ‘Go to bed’ and ‘Wake up’ in my date book as if they were two separate events.” That’s pretty much the whole scene.

But it’s not the whole story; Kicking and Screaming extends far beyond the screen for me. I owe it a debt of thanks for some of my great relationships—two friendships, two romances. As long as you graduated from college, the movie is easy to mine for insights that might otherwise take multiple dates to stumble upon. If I’m lucky enough to find someone who loves the film as much as I do, it acts as a kind of shorthand. One of these people just bought me a bag of black-eyed peas for my birthday. This was touching. On the other hand, I once gathered a small group of friends to watch the movie; no one was in the mood to concentrate on nuanced dialogue, and they talked through the whole thing. I no longer speak to these people.

Actually, everyone has a movie or two that they feel this way toward, or should. So what makes Kicking and Screaming so cultish? It’s conceivable, when watching even the most precious of our precious movies—The Royal Tenenbaums, Garden State, Little Miss Sunshine—to skate along the surface of things, to revel in the randomness throughout and the hope provided at the end. Kicking and Screaming, however, is mercilessly melancholy. Basically, it feels real. It’s also unlike the much-loved Whit Stillman films that it’s more closely related to (Barcelona, Metropolitan, The Last Days of Disco) in that it’s relentlessly fixated on minutiae. There’s always something extraordinarily average to incorporate into one’s daily life.

This is a film which taught me how to return beer if there’s food in it. How to parallel-park. How to show up drunk to therapy. How to sleep with a freshman. It unwittingly holds the answers to a lot of life’s little questions just at it claims to have none. Career: “What I used to pass off as just another bad summer could now potentially turn into a bad life.” Extracurricular activities: “Perhaps we should disband the club now before feelings get hurt.” Book reviewing: “The scene with the carrot peeler really resonated.” Sex: “I’d like to fuck her on the tennis court, if you get my meaning.” Racial relations and/or inept figures of speech: “Racism spans from here to the dance floor!” Parental relations: “Isn’t it bad enough to be whipped by your own mother, you have to have this wussy relationship with Grover’s?” Staying in for the night: “I’m nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday. I’ve begun reminiscing events before they even occur. I’m reminiscing this right now. I can’t go to the bar because I’ve already looked back at it in my memory and I didn’t have a good time.”

The Web site Overheard in New York arguably owes its existence to Kicking and Screaming. In fact, the first real line of the movie takes place at the graduation party, when someone practically off-camera says, “I think violence is always justified some of the time.” The closest I ever got to something that good was walking up Sixth Avenue past St. Vincent’s one night: “And I said, ‘I don’t know what that thing is, but it’s not touching my head unless you unplug it.’”

I still plan on holding onto my VHS version of Kicking and Screaming. I’m not exactly sure why, but the uncertainty seems in line with the themes of the movie.

I had another small viewing party when the DVD came out—this time at my apartment and for a carefully chosen audience. Because you can literally see more of the movie on the new edition, it changes slightly. In one scene on the VHS edition, there’s a poster in the background with half a cookie on it. There is writing beneath the cookie, but it’s been impossible to read for over a decade. If this was Napoleon Dynamite, it might have said: “Cookies Are Awesome.” If this was Lost in Translation, it might have said: “Be Happy.” In Kicking and Screaming, it reads: “Pro-Life?”

On the new DVD edition, there’s an interview that Mr. Baumbach does with Mr. Eigeman, who speaks of having dinner at a restaurant when some fan slips him a note that says “Broken Glass,” a joke from the movie. But the actor diagnoses this experience positively: He sees it not as the odd behavior of a clinging fan, but as a subtle tip of the hat to an old project that still has a lot of meaning for a lot of people. I was relieved. He could have easily gone in the other direction. After all, it’s bad enough that I’m whipped by my own life, now I have to have this wussy relationship with theirs as well.