It’s a family affair. The indie comedy “Tiny Furniture,” out Friday, is directed and written by 24-year-old Lena Dunham. She also has the lead role, recent college grad Aura.
Lena’s teenage sister, Grace Dunham, and mom, photographer Laurie Simmons, have supporting roles — as Aura’s sister and mom.
And the film was lensed in and around the Dunham family’s real-life, white-on-white TriBeCa loft.
The story concerns Aura’s first days back home. She meets an obnoxious young man who moves himself into her loft on their first date.
She gets a job as a hostess in a neighborhood eatery and falls for the hipster chef. He has a girlfriend, but that doesn’t stop him from having sex with Aura in a large drainage pipe on the street.
Thank goodness Aura’s childhood friend Charlotte (played with pizzazz by Jemima Kirke) is around to offer comfort and advice.
So how much of the film is based on Lena and family’s real life?
“It’s kind of a complicated question,” Grace tells me during a whirlwind trip to NYC from Brown University in Providence, R .I., where she is a freshman.
“A lot of stuff in the movie happened; a lot of those interactions were very close to interactions that happened in real life. But I think that it can’t be completely real because it’s a story, and the pieces are put together to make a story. Everybody’s personas are exaggerated from the way they are in real life.”
There’s no sign of a father in the movie, but that can be misleading. “I have a very present and loving father, who just didn’t want to be in the movie,” Grace explains. “He lives in the loft. He’s a painter who has a studio in Connecticut, where he works about half the time.
“Lena decided that instead of finding an actor to play the father, it would be more interesting to not have him there at all.”
“Tiny Furniture” — winner of the best-narrative prize at SXSW and a nominee for a Gotham Independent Film Award — is the second time the sisters have worked together. In Lena’s 2006 short “Dealing,” Grace, then in eighth grade, plays a 13-year-old art dealer.
“It got into Slamdance, and that’s when it all started, and Lena got into making movies,” Grace notes. Now Lena is working on an HBO pilot with Judd Apatow.
Being directed by her sister was no big deal for tall, dark-haired Grace, who sports glasses just like her mother’s. (“I bought them first,” Grace is quick to point out.)
“It was really comfortable,” Grace says of working with Lena. “It was a really casual thing, and we talked to each other like sisters. But I also think she is such a great presence on set, and really works with people so well. She knows how to push people without being forceful.”
V.A. Musetto is film editor of The Post;