Don Roos’ “Happy Endings” rattles dangerously with themes of gay parenthood, abortion, gold-digging and erotic massage, but the display is for show only. At heart, the movie is a meek and broad-minded inclusion fantasy: Fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, friends of all orientations coming together. Or something like that.

Like Paul Haggis’ “Crash” with a bit more cheek, “Happy Endings” is an ensemble affair that crisscrosses between a network of desperate, isolated Angelenos. Two decades after giving up her baby for adoption, social worker Mamie (Lisa Kudrow) finds herself alone and embittered.

Out of the blue, an aspiring filmmaker (Jesse Bradford from “Swimfan”) claiming to know her long-lost son tries to blackmail Mamie into collaborating on a documentary film that will reunite mother and child.

While that intrigue spins off into unexpected — and perhaps contrived — directions, Mamie’s gay stepbrother, Charlie (Steve Coogan from “24 Hour Party People”) jealously eyes the children of two lesbian friends (played by “24” baddie Sarah Clarke and Laura Dern) and frets about his own foundering partnership.

Tom Arnold — he of “The Best Damn Sports Show Period” and the performance-art marriage to Roseanne Barr — gives a doleful, surprisingly nuanced performance as Frank, the father of a closeted gay teen (Jason Ritter from “Raise Your Voice”) who works at Charlie’s restaurant. Cluelessly, the well-to-do Frank falls between the romantic cross hairs of Jude, a supple-limbed harpy barfly played by Maggie Gyllenhaal (“Secretary”). As a woman who enters and leaves relationships for nothing but the worst reasons, Gyllenhaal makes for an intriguing question mark, whether she’s weighing motherhood or purring Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are” into a karaoke microphone.

In lieu of a narrator, Roos (“The Opposite of Sex”) inserts title cards with his own omniscient musings, lending the sense that we’re watching some Charlie Kaufmanesque war reel of his subconscious mind. “Happy Endings” isn’t as cleverly subversive as “The Opposite of Sex” (we’ll forget Roos’ featherlight “Bounce”), but it feels more important. When Marnie tells Jude that she isn’t “pro-life” and Jude replies with a curt “Who is?” Roos isn’t taking shots at either side of the abortion debate, but at cynicism itself.