‘Anomalisa’ is singular and stunning

Starring the voices of David Thewlis, Tom Noonan and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Directed by Duke Johnson and Charlie Kaufman.

Rated R for profanity, nudity, sex and adult themes. Check listings for theaters. 1 hour, 30 minutes.

Bottom line: A portrait of a man in midlife with regret and mundanity

“Anomalisa” begins with a pitch-dark screen and a mounting cacophony of voices — aural detritus, everyday yak. Then a sun-burnished cloudscape appears, a jet slices through the cumulus, we’re inside the plane, and the passengers are all … puppets.

In one row, with the eyes of a sad, unsatisfied man, sits Michael Stone (the voice of David Thewlis), en route from Los Angeles to a conference in Cincinnati, where he is to be the guest speaker. He is the author of a customer-service book, “How May I Help You Help Them?” We spend the rest of this stop-motion animated tale (yes, the same painstaking process used for “Gumby,” “Wallace and Gromit,” “Fantastic Mr. Fox”) in his self-loathing company.

And, for a time, in the company of Lisa (the voice of, well, we’ll get to that), an eager-beaver customer-service worker who has driven from Akron to hear Stone’s talk. Martinis (him) and mojitos (her) are downed, an elevator takes them from the hotel bar to his room, and the rest isn’t left to anyone’s imagination.

Written and codirected by Charlie Kaufman, the angsty maestro behind “Being John Malkovich,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” and “Adaptation” — movies that poke around the brainpan to disturbing, often comic effect — “Anomalisa” offers a portrait of a man in a midlife morass of regret and mundanity. He’s in existential crisis (hey, who isn’t?!), pulling on cigarettes and pulling up his pants over an unflattering girth.

Part of the creepy genius of “Anomalisa” — codirected by animator Duke Johnson, adapted from a Kaufman play (under the nom de plume Francis Fregoli), and funded in no small measure by 5,770 Kickstarter fans — is that its not-quite-lifelike humans both mirror our reality and suggest the tenuous hold we have on it. Things could unhinge.

“Anomalisa’s” title conjoins the word anomaly with the name of Martin’s newfound friend. “Your voice is like magic,” he tells her, and, indeed, as spoken (and sung) by Jennifer Jason Leigh, Lisa’s words open up a window that lets Martin look at the world — and hear it — in a different, better way. But odds are that it’s a fleeting thing, odds are that all the babble (every other character’s voice is that of actor Tom Noonan) will descend on Martin again.

After all, it’s a Charlie Kaufman world. Things can’t possibly end well, can they?