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“Then She Found Me,” Helen Hunt’s first film as a director, digs into human nature without using any protective gear.

Raw and hopeful, funny and dark, “Then She Found Me” is a story of children and parents, lovers and exes, and biological clocks ticking loudly. It’s about people who ask too much without knowing how to give.

Hunt plays April, a New York schoolteacher whose man-child husband, Ben (Matthew Broderick), announces that he’s fallen in love with another woman. Before he walks out on her, April cajoles him into having sex, which proves not to be a cure for their woes.

When it rains, it pours. April’s mother, Trudy (Lynn Cohen), dies after nagging to the end that April should drop her obsession with having a baby and adopt already. Adopted herself, April believes that she didn’t elicit the same affection that her brother, Freddy (Ben Shenkman), Trudy’s child by birth, did from their mother.

Ben’s side of the bed is barely cold when April meets Frank (Colin Firth), the father of one of her young students. Frank is still bitter over his divorce, and though he and April clash at first, they soon make an emotional connection.

In the midst of April’s upheaval, her birth mother, Bernice (Bette Midler), shows up out of nowhere and tries to force her way into April’s life. It’s no surprise that April loses her balance and has to get to know herself and what she wants before she can get her life together.

The characters in “Then She Found Me” aren’t sweet and easy to like. They’re prickly and messed up, but they prove to be worth knowing. Hunt, who’s made a habit of playing self-possessed women, segues nicely into April’s untidy psyche.

Firth keeps Frank’s dark side from gaining too much ground, while Midler peels off Bernice’s abrasive layers at just the right pace.

Adapted from a novel by Elinor Lipman, the script — by Alice Arlen, Victor Levin and Hunt — juggles a plethora of plots deftly. The quips will reel viewers in, but the maturing process will win them over.

Director Hunt gives “Then She Found Me” empathy but not too much sentimentality. She makes the flip sides of being a parent and being a child play well together.

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Betsy Pickle writes for The Knoxville News Sentinel in Tenn.