The divorce tale “The Squid and the Whale” led contenders Tuesday for the Independent Spirit Awards with six nominations, including best-picture and honors for director Noah Baumbach and actors Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney.

The other best-picture nominees were the cowboy tales “Brokeback Mountain” and “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada” and the film biographies “Capote” and “Good Night, and Good Luck.” Those four movies all had four nominations each for the awards, which honor films whose financing comes at least partly from independent sources outside the Hollywood studio system.

Daniels was nominated for lead actor and Linney for lead actress as parents going through a caustic divorce in “The Squid and the Whale,” inspired by writer-director Baumbach’s own parents’ breakup in the 1980s.

Jesse Eisenberg scored a supporting-actor nomination as Daniels and Linney’s son, and Baumbach was nominated for directing and his screenplay.

Other lead-actor nominees were Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote in “Capote,” a chronicle of the author’s years creating the true-crime novel “In Cold Blood;” Terrence Howard as a pimp and drug dealer trying to build a rap career in “Hustle & Flow;” Heath Ledger as a family man carrying on a gay affair with an old ranch buddy in “Brokeback Mountain;” and David Strathairn as Edward R. Murrow in “Good Night, and Good Luck,” an account of the newsman’s battle against the 1950s communist witch hunt.

Also among lead-actress contenders were Felicity Huffman in a gender-bending role in “Transamerica,” a road-trip tale about a man preparing for the final surgical procedures to become a woman; Dina Korzun as a Russian woman married to a rock ‘n’ roll legend who becomes involved with her husband’s son in “Forty Shades of Blue;” S. Epatha Merkerson as proprietor of a boarding house who takes in an outcast teen in “Lackawanna Blues;” and Cyndi Williams in “Room,” about a Texas woman who searches for a mysterious place she sees in visions.