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So a bunch of wild-partying single guys go out on the town looking for a good time. Meanwhile, a working girl decides to go out to celebrate her big promotion. Boy meets girl at the club. They hit it off. They dance, they get drunk. Boy and girl go home and hop in the sack. Boy gets girl pregnant. Oops.

Such is the plot of Knocked Up, the latest effort from writer-director Judd Apatow, the man who directedThe 40 Year Old Virgin, and who also produced Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby and Anchorman. It’s a simple story, but it’s really the way Apatow tells it that makes it interesting.

Apatow had two challenges in this flick. The first was to bring us a film that could hold our interest without the comic genius of either Will Ferrell or Steve Carell (beyond a brief cameo appearance). The second challenge was to find a way to make a boy-gets-girl-pregnant story original, interesting and most of all funny. To a large extent he succeeds.

The movie gets its life primarily from a bevy of colorful characters. Foremost among them is the main man of the film Ben Stone, played by Apatow-movie regular Seth Rogen. He plays a good-hearted slacker-stoner who is trying in vain to start up a website charting nude scenes of females in the movies (a la Mr. Skin). He is surrounded by a hilarious group of fellow stoners played by Apatow regulars Jason Segal (from How I Met Your Mother), Jay Baruchel (of TV’s Undeclared), and Apatow regulars Jonah Hill and Martin Starr. All of them provide their characters with strong, eccentric personalities and just a touch of charm.

The girl in this boy-meets-girl saga is Katherine Heigl (Grey’s Anatomy). She gives her portrayal of Alison Scott, a newly-minted correspondent for E! Entertainment Television, a convincing vulnerability. Her world includes her uptight, high-strung sister Debbie (Leslie Mann, who in real life is Judd Apatow’s wife), Debbie’s burned-out-on-marriage husband Pete (Paul Rudd)— and their kids. It’s a large cast to be sure, but every character is memorable in this movie. You could have made a TV sitcom starring these characters and I say that in the most positive light imaginable. These irreverent personalities remind me of the cast of Seinfeld. This is what we might have gotten from the brilliant-but-cancelled Apatow had he stayed with TV comedy. What Freaks and Geeks was to high school and Undeclared was to college, Knocked Up is to post-college adulthood. It would have been quite a show.

It still makes for a good movie, though, seeing how Ben and Alison and the rest of the folks in the cast deal with this unexpected pregnancy. I say “unexpected” deliberately here. The story is not so much about an “unwanted” pregnancy as it is one about how to deal with the challenges life throws at you. It is pretty clear that the filmmakers did not want to turn this movie into a big debate over the abortion issue. The question of whether or not to keep the baby is dealt with in short order. There’s a very funny scene where the guys discuss the possibility of an abortion without ever actually using the word “abortion”, but it becomes pretty obvious that terminating the pregnancy is out of the question. There’s a moving scene in the gynecologist’s office where Alison learns once and for all that she is pregnant, and I won’t spoil it by giving many details. Suffice it to say that it’s a moving moment and you’ll realize from that scene alone how difficult it would have been for Alison to give up the baby.

Beyond that, there are unexpected moments. Among other things, Ben and Alison decide to try and make their one-night stand turn into a meaningful relationship— not easy to do, since Ben is an unattractive terminal slacker with drug problems. Complicating matters is the tense Debbie-Pete relationship, which adds another dynamic to the situation. Do Ben and Alison really want to travel down the same path as Debbie and Pete, with their marriage and all its problems? True, there’s also a love story between Ben and Alison, but it’s not the usual kind of love story that you see in the movies. In fact their relationship is very complicated, partly because of the sudden pregnancy but also due to other things, and it’s interesting seeing the two of them deal with that.

What this movie really turns into is not some tale about a shotgun romance, or some depressing political debate of the merits of choosing life over abortion or vice versa. Instead, it’s about two people who care about one another very much, struggling to figure out how to do the right thing and do right with each other, and above all how to handle newfound responsibility. Though in this case, the person really struggling with the responsibility issue is Ben. Like the Steve Carell character in The 40 Year Old Virgin, Ben is his own worst enemy. Andy Stitzer had to deal with his fear and lack of experience with sex; Ben has to deal with his fear/lack of responsibility in general. And like Catherine Keener’s character, Katherine Heigl’s Alison is there to guide Ben along the way as he battles his own demons. That’s really what this movie is about.

This movie shares one more similarity to The 40 Year Old Virgin: the length. Judd Apatow just can’t figure out for the life of him how to cut a movie down to size in the editing room, as this flick clocked more than two hours.There were also some dull moments in the second half of the movie as the filmmakers struggled to tie up loose ends and come to a satisfying conclusion. (In fact there are probably enough loose ends to warrant a sequel, which I wouldn’t mind seeing, quite frankly.) There were a few times when some big issues were perhaps too tidily resolved. I could nitpick about a number of things. But as they say in the movie, sometimes you have to roll with the punches. I was too busy rolling in the aisles with laughter most of the time. I cut them some slack.

The movie regains its momentum with the climactic birth scene. It’s the high point of the movie. It’s very funny and not without its own surprises, and is sure to gross a few people out. Needless to say, this scene alone earns this movie the “R” rating.

Overall, Judd Apatow has again found a way to make an “R” movie with a heart. Credit goes not just to him, but to the team he has assembled who have become “Apatow regulars” in his movies and on TV. They gave us characters with heart, and that was important. They also provided a completely original take on the woman-giving-birth storyline, which is not an easy thing to do.

It’s rapidly getting to the point with this guy Apatow where there is no longer a question of whether his movies will turn out to be good or not. You are no longer comparing a Judd Apatow movie against other flicks. Instead, you’re ranking Apatow’s movies against the rest of his work to see if he can top himself.

On that score, Knocked Up ranks right there with The 40 Year Old Virgin , just ahead of Talladega Nights, and way ahead of Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. And keep this in mind: I liked Anchorman a lot, too.

When you start to be compared to yourself, that’s a sure sign you’re doing something right.