BY JOE TYRRELL

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

Like salmon swimming upstream to spawn, the frantic parents and nervous teenagers applying to the local elite university offer tempting targets for grizzled satirists.

Tina Fey’s new dramedy “Admission” immerses itself in that system, and pulls up some laughs from the free-flowing angst. But it has other fish to fry.

The academic setting serves to amplify the personal concerns that bubble up frequently in Fey’s work. As admissions officer Portia Nathan, the star is once again a pretty smart, reasonably pretty and fairly successful career woman feeling somewhat adrift.

Has she settled, in her work and in her long-term relationship with Mark, the chairman of the English department and evidently president of the Narcissus society? He pats her fondly, on the head, and refers to her as a “golden retriever” of promising students from high school marshlands.

At work, Portia has perhaps not been on the fast track, but has pressed onward and upward for 16 years. Now, she is on the verge of succeeding her boss, Clarence (Wallace Shawn), about to retire after a career of spent casting a cold eye on applicants and colleagues.

But there is another contender, the equally bright, equally attractive and more showily efficient Corinne (Gloria Reuben). Paternally, Clarence demands that they demonstrate their teamwork even as he dangles the bait in front of them.

Portia’s acerbic mother, “it’s time you started calling me Susannah,” firmly believes that under God’s power, her daughter is coasting. Lily Tomlin presents this feminist author as ready with a shotgun, or for courting with the right mix of politesse and ardor.

Tomlin sends juice coursing through “Admission” every time she is on screen, and her match with Fey was made in comedy genealogy. They are all the more effective because their laugh lines are throwaways ensnared in nets of grievance and frustration.

All these promising set-ups build on the sly feminism of the two actresses, and especially Fey’s obsessive compulsion about the collateral effects of the workplace on personal life. Director Paul Weitz found that fertile ground with “In Good Company,” although the lack of workplace featured in his “About a Boy.”

With all this going for it, though, “Admission” slips when it comes to the unnecessary rom-com complications.

As the love interest, Paul Rudd is his usual, nice enough and cute enough. Here, he’s playing John Pressman, the headmaster of a newly accredited experimental school.

John’s friendly, but not overly friendly. He’s got skills, but some learned on the Internet. He comes from gin-drenched money, but he’s traveled the world doing good. Along the way, he’s adopted a sensible Ethiopian orphan Nelson, now 12 and photogenic as played by Travaris Spears.

But Dartmouth-graduate John just cannot stop doing, by his lights, the right thing. He knows a secret about fellow alum Portia, and he thinks he can help. That assistance takes the form of a brilliant but previously troubled student, Jeremiah (Nat Wolff), a sponge of knowledge.

Not only is Jeremiah worthy of ivy-covered halls, he is exactly what Portia has been seeking, at least in the view of single-parent John. But all this plotting depends not just on a series of unchallenged assumptions, but unsupported contrivances.

Karen Croner’s script comes from a novel by Jean Hanff Korelitz, and contains the kind of occurrences that may be picaresque word bubbles on the page, but fall precipitously when acted out in a physical world. As a minor point, this movie overestimates how still a 12-year-old might be during an hours long drive from Upstate Wherever to New Jersey.

By the way, although there are some narrow views of the Princeton campus, “Admission” does not include much local flavor. That’s unsurprising, since much of the movie was shot in and around Purchase, N.Y., to take advantage of tax credits. Don’t much eating clubs, there’s not even the House of Cupcakes.

Meanwhile, that admissions process does come under caustic scrutiny from the precocious kids at John Pressman’s experimental school, who are thoroughly unimpressed with Portia’s elite pitch. But the moment quickly passes, as Jeremiah goes for it.

Similarly, the movie’s useful device for representing admissions, with the young applicants briefly materializing for a chance, or not, to make their plea, will chill the cockles of aspirational parents everywhere.

And after a series are dispatched via trapdoor, when one boy succeeds in gaining a “Princeton” sweatshirt, its prison gray color and safety orange lettering suggest a life at the workhouse.

These individual sequences make some wavelets, and the movie carefully propels Portia beyond her professional personal comfort zones. But these moments also pass.

Like a good dog, “Admission” is a movie that nuzzles up and plays with conventions before setting them neatly back into place. And like its heroine, its record is respectable but not dazzling.

Joe Tyrrell may be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or followed on Twitter at jtyrrell87.