2 Days in New York is Julie Delpy’s second foray into French family farce, tinged with absurdity, but grounded in the real comedy at which she’s so adept.

The follow up to 2007’s 2 Days in Paris, the film finds Paris-born New Yorker Marion (Julie Delpy) two years down the line living with new boyfriend, Mingus (Chris Rock) and their two children from previous relationships. Marion’s a neurotic, blonde, French, lady Woody Allen-type on the eve of a gallery opening, a visit from the family, and apparently a nervous breakdown.

The French storm the compound following a brief detention at customs wherein Marion’s father, Jeannot (Delpy’s real father, Albert) gets caught with a metric ton of cheese and sausages on his person. The incident sets the tone for the rest of the film, a wonderful, hilarious, gross, real look at what happens when worlds collide and Chris Rock plays the straight man. Marion’s oversexed sister rose (co-writer Alexia Landeau) and a surprise visitor, her creepy boyfriend Manu (Alex Nahon) round out the entourage.

Much of the humor stems from the Franco-American culture clash inherent in a weeklong language barrier. Even with characters who can’t communicate verbally, the reality of family awkwardness leaps off the screen and into that small chamber of the heart where visceral discomfort lives.

Mingus is the American representative in this French three-ring circus, and it is a true pleasure to watch him try to bond with Jeannot without Marion there to interpret. Mingus takes Jeannot for a massage down the street, and is horrified when insufficient towel coverage nearly leads to an incident of indecent exposure, and is even more surprised to find Jeannot joking with the staff in Vietnamese post massage. He’s even more adrift at a family dinner that pushes the limits of comfortable decibel levels. It’s a deftly acted and brilliantly edited scene in two languages that tests the progressive limits of an American audience with Jeannot and Manu’s blasé attitude toward sex and drugs while the sisters bicker compulsively at the other end of the table. The fugue is brought to its crescendo as a knock at the door brings a drug dealer into the mix so that Manu can buy weed.

Delpy is adroit with self-deprecation and keen observation, playing this version of herself as flawed but smart and a little bit crazy. She diffuses a fight with a neighbor in the elevator by claiming she’s suffering from a terminal brain tumor. It’s a quick move that sets the movie off in a different direction for the last half, maneuvering through the disastrous art show where Marion insults an art critic, literally sells her soul, and then takes off before every piece sells (if only because patrons think she’s about to die). The intimate family farce takes a turn for the absurd when Marion gets in a fight with the actor Vincent Gallo (Vincent Gallo), but resolves itself with a funny, albeit weird family moment that elicits a warm, happy feeling.

The film is peppered with simple but hilarious details. Mingus’s works out his internal angst in conversations with a life size cut out of Barack Obama. Rose and Manu can’t get over the fact that Mingus’s name rhymes with a certain sexual act. Willow (Talen Riley), Mingus’s daughter is a first grader obsessed with death, and Marion’s son Lulu calls Mingus “fake daddy.” Equal screen time is awarded to the butts of Jeannot and Rose to similar comedic effect.

Delpy makes use of an inventive take on the montage, flicking through tourist snapshots of the family in New York over a lively soundtrack. It elicits the breathless excitement of a real trip to New York with all the off-center, finger-in-the-frame glory of an amateur photographer. It’s just one more element of a grounded, realistic, and wholly likeable family comedy.