Jesse Eisenberg has a few questions

Vanessa Redgrave once compared Jesse Eisenberg to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley because of his “inquiring mind”. Seventeen minutes into my most recent lunch with Eisenberg in Chelsea, I had yet to ask him a question, but he had peppered me with plenty of his own. Where was I from? How did so-and-so know? Was I consulted about my The New Yorker cartoon avatar? When I first saw him, crossing the street to the restaurant, he had a postman in his fist. “People are so nice when you’re famous, I guess,” he reasoned, sounding apologetic. “Or maybe not. I don’t know.” He looked at his menu. “What are you going to get?”

Eisenberg wore a hoodie and an Indiana Hoosiers cap, plus a splint on one finger due to an injury sustained during “a big stunt sequence” on the set of “Now You See Me 3.” He was buzzing with anxiety and a kind of ambient guilt that turns out to be his fuel. For more than two decades—he’s forty-one but started acting young—his motor neuroticism has been his defining quality on screen, whether as an awkward teenager (“Roger Dodger”), a romantic lead (“Adventureland”). divorced father (“Fleishman Is in Trouble”), a supervillain (Lex Luthor, Mark Zuckerberg) or a Woody Allen stand-in (“From Rome with Love”, “Café Society”). Along the way he has written: plays, screenplays, silly songs for his private amusement and humor McSweeney’s and The New Yorker.

His new film, “A Real Pain,” out this week, is one he wrote and directed himself. Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin play Jewish cousins ​​who go to Poland to go on a Holocaust tour and visit their late grandmother’s childhood home. David (Eisenberg) is a high-strung fuddy-duddy with a wife and child; Benji (Culkin) is a charismatic stoner with no boundaries and barely hidden psychological wounds. The film premiered at Sundance, where it won a screenwriting award; it’s already getting Oscar buzz.

In his work, too, Eisenberg is a relentless questioner, particularly of moral vanity and his own seemingly noble intentions: How can one do real good in the world, rather than simply satisfy the liberal need to appear virtuous? How do you process your ancestors’ pain, much less your own? Shouldn’t we all feel a little more uncomfortable? Our conversation, which covered these life conundrums and more, has been edited and condensed.

Let’s start with the obvious. Did you take a trip to Poland like the one in the movie?

Yes. In 2008, my wife and I went to pretty much all the places that the characters visit, and ended up in this house in Krasnystaw, where my family lived until 1938. I stood outside this house and tried to feel something deeply destructive, and not. That’s kind of what happens at the end of this movie: The characters finally get to this house and have these big emotional expectations that are just met by a typical three-story apartment building.

Okay, that’s anticlimactic. What inspired you to go? Have you always been interested in your ancestry?

When I was seventeen, I was looking for direction, and I found it with my father’s Aunt Doris, who was in her late eighties. She lived until one hundred and six. I went to her house every Thursday and she became my life mentor. In the movie, we call her Grandma Dory, and she is as we describe: she was blunt, tough, and unimpressed by anything I had to offer that wasn’t from a place of substance. I even lived with her in the early thirties. My wife and I weren’t together for a while and I moved into her little studio and slept on her couch because I needed grounding. She was born and raised in Poland, in the house that we show in the film. And I said to her, “If I ever get a job in Europe, I want to visit that house and take a picture for you.”

When you did, what was her reaction?

I took a picture of the house, went to Kinko’s and had it blown up with a glossy finish. I thought she would start crying and realize that her life had come full circle. She just looked at it for a moment and said, “Oh, yes, it is.”

Again an anticlimax.

Accurate. From the moment I started researching her life, Poland as an idea gave me a certain meaning that I was missing. I lived with material security and appropriate anti-depressants for the things that tormented me. Having a connection to something bigger, something historical, something traumatic, made me feel like I was a real person and not just floating through a lucky life of superficial emptiness.

Do you mean to be famous?

No, just being a modern person who has enough money to live comfortably. I just feel embarrassed about it. Sebastian Junger just wrote this book where he talks about being in Bosnia during the war and he says he wasn’t there as an adrenaline junkie but as a opinion junkie. My wife teaches disability law and she teaches at a continuing education school. She doesn’t walk around with a sense of shame and embarrassment and guilt. She walks around with a feeling of: How can I be of service?

In your own writing, you’ve played with this feeling that you have. I saw your play “Asuncion” in 2011 and the line I still remember is when your character says he wants to go to a famine-stricken part of Africa because “I thought I could be of use.”

Oh, my God! I can’t believe you remember this shit.

I remember that line because it nails a kind of ignorant self-righteousness. But that’s also what you’re talking about, what you’re actually looking for.

Yes, because in my attempt to find meaning I find myself indulging in the very things that I find disgusting. We went to Teresópolis in Brazil and we tried to help the Red Cross there because there had been a flood. But I’m not strong enough to carry the flour bags, so I just become this American liability. I also recognize the foolishness of someone like me assuming that their life hair a greater purpose, if only I could find it. Luckily, I’m in the arts so I can explore it in these creative and ambivalent ways. “A Real Pain” tries to show these two characters searching for meaning, and they don’t really find it in the places they expect. They don’t find it in a concentration camp or in seeing their grandmother’s house. They actually find meaning in their very close relationship.

More than anything, I guess I just constantly question my own – what is the word? – hypocrisy. And then the irony is that I write about my hypocrisy, and because I write about it and occasionally get praised for it, it perpetuates exactly what I’m trying to avoid. By writing about trying to connect to something real, I end up going to parties for my film and wearing a tuxedo, which in turn takes me further away from what I’m striving for.

Welcome to award season! Among other things, this movie is a great movie about cousins, and I feel like it’s an underexplored relationship. I Googled “movies about cousins” and the ones I found were “My Cousin Vinny”, “Mary Queen of Scots” – because her cousin was Queen Elizabeth I – and the strangest, “The Blue Lagoon”. People don’t remember that those kids were cousins ​​until they got shipwrecked on a desert island and started having sex in a waterfall or whatever.