Sometimes, the best stories you hear are great not because of the actual story, but because of the manner in which it is told.

A teller of great stories can weave a set of typical characters in typical situations into a clever, ironic farce or a profound human drama. The question at hand, however, is which kind of story is more engaging — comedy or drama?

At a quiet dinner in downtown New York, four friends discuss this question in Woody Allen’s latest film, “Melinda and Melinda.” Two fellow playwrights, Sy and Max, played respectively by Wallace Shawn and Larry Pine, give their interpretations of a single story in which a young, lost soul, Melinda, stumbles into the lives of a New York couple. For Sy, a comedy writer, Melinda is the neurotic downstairs neighbor looking for love in, of course, the wrong places. For Max, Melinda is a suicidal basket case who “will always need help.”

Allen, himself a great storyteller, chooses an atypical narrative style for the film, jumping back and forth between Sy and Max’s interpretations, each employing an entirely different cast of actors to portray each writer’s set of characters. That is, except for Melinda, played on both sides by Radha Mitchell, though the Melindas in either story are practically unrecognizable as the same actress.

The importance of the storytelling over the story itself becomes evident fairly early in the film. Besides Mitchell’s Melinda and Will Ferrell’s perfectly hilarious and neurotic Hobie, the rest of the characters are rather plain and the story fairly predictable: jealousy, alcoholism, a stagnant career, etc.

With typical modern film elements, Allen can better emphasize his purpose of a self-reflective film in which the viewer’s attention is drawn to the manner in which he is delivering the story. Like Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window,” it seems “Melinda and Melinda” is a film less about the plight of the characters and more about the making of the movie itself.

This is one of the few Woody Allen films in which Allen himself doesn’t appear. Though he never makes himself known physically, he is hiding everywhere — in Ferrell’s confused stuttering, swimming in Melinda’s fifth glass of red wine and floating around in the cigarette smoke. “Melinda and Melinda” is Woody Allen through and through — best watched with an open mind, an inquisitive eye and a melancholy sense of irony.