It’s a tough act to balance comedy and drama … especially if you’re balancing themes of suicide and familial estrangement with humor and heart. Director Craig Johnson, however, finds just the right balance for the dramedy "The Skeleton Twins," mixing heartache with hilarity, and giving "Saturday Night Live" alums Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader time to flex their dramatic muscles.

The film hardly reinvents the cinematic wheel, but it sure is an appealing little dramedy that works mainly because of the two shining lead performances. 

Maggie (Wiig) and Milo (Hader) haven’t seen each other in 10 years. They lead lives on opposite coasts – he's in California; she's in New York – that are much different than what they had in mind. However, they’re united by an emotional act of desperation to find a way out of their unsatisfying lives. As the film begins, Milo attempts suicide by slitting his wrists. During the same time, Maggie stands in her bathroom with a handful of sleeping pills, but her plan is disrupted with an alerting phone call concerning Milo.

She heads out to California and convinces the stubborn Milo to come back to New York with her. Although he's not too thrilled about the idea, he goes back because, well, he has nowhere else to go.

Milo, after all, is a lonely gay man who had moved to California to become an actor, but he found himself waiting tables instead. When he returns to New York, he ventures to a bookstore to find his closeted high school English teacher Rich (Ty Burrell, "Modern Family"), whom he had a troubled, sexual relationship with at 15. The deeply closeted Rich, who now has a teenage son and is in a heterosexual relationship, initially doesn’t welcome Milo’s reappearance. This reignites a rekindling of sorts that was troubled from the start.

Maggie, on the other hand, is a dental hygienist unhappily married to the devoted but unexciting Lance (an amusing Luke Wilson). The couple lives in a cozy, upper state home, and life for her is moving at a pace in which would be satisfying to most, but not for her. She’s miserable, but masks this with a good game face. She even stashes and uses birth control in the bathroom much to the obliviousness of Lance, who thinks they’re making an honest effort in trying to start a family. Unsatisfied, she finds herself having an affair with her scuba instructor (Boyd Holbrook, "Gone Girl").

When they’re under one roof, Maggie and Milo are forced to deal with unresolved issues all relating to their depression, which stems from their poor life choices, their uncaring mother and childhood pains. This commonality brings them together even closer.

With "The Skeleton Twins," both Wiig and Hader prove that they’re a special brand of comedians who can be hilarious and charismatic, as well as convincingly poignant in a more dramatic role. The range on display here is undeniable. Wiig has already been on a dramedy kick as of late and has proven to be the most impressive aspect in films such as "Girl Most Likely" and "Hateship Loveship."

In this, she gives a fine-tuned performance as Maggie, in which she masterfully gives little quirks and facial cues to heavily suggest her displeasure. She greatly registers this resentment and a lack of satisfaction all in the meantime seemingly having a blast in the more lighthearted moments. 

Much like Wiig, Hader is an actor with an exuberant amount of dramatic potential. He owns his role as Milo, a character that has traits in which he hasn’t taken a crack at before such as unfiltered cynicism and hints of narcissism. Milo is a desperate character, searching for love and happiness in the wrong places just so he won’t be alone. Hader, who is most definitely worthy of awards and lots of them, remarkably exemplifies this desperation and loneliness.

There’s scene that’s particularly emotional in which he tells Maggie how he was bullied in high school and how he regrets that the bully remains ahead of him in life. As he discovered online, the bully now has a family and a good job, while he never became the famous actor he had hoped he would become. This pain radiates off of Hader in this moment, which suggests that even when he’s not displaying flamboyancy as Stefon on "SNL" or being his comically zany self, he’s still very much a force of talent.

Although there’s dark material in the film, if you’re a fan of Wiig and Hader, there’s still a lot to enjoy about the film. As they both have already shown on "SNL" for years, they share tremendous chemistry, a shared eccentricity and endearment, which make their sibling dynamic plausible rather than artificial. Whether they’re fighting, having heart-to-hearts with one another when the two characters peel back layers of their lives or making each other laugh, this chemistry is engaging to the highest degree.

This chemistry is most apparent especially during a scene in which the two prance around like goofballs while lip-syncing the 1980s anthem "Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now" by Starship, one of the film’s many highlights.

There’s a lot that’s familiar and slightly predictable about this film and other dramedies from the same vain that have come before it. Director Craig Johnson didn’t have any visual tricks up his sleeve, but that doesn’t matter because it’s a film that lends itself to its story and characters more so than anything else. The screenplay he wrote with Mark Heyman ("Black Swan") won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Prize at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and for good reason.

"The Skeleton Twins" is much more than a display of Wiig and Hader’s talent; it’s more so an engaging, little story about two broken siblings who piece each other back together in a smartly paced, heart-to-heart way.