Offscreen bonds help the ensemble cast of The Hungry Bachelors Club bring a relaxed emotional honesty to their roles.

If you glimpsed the title The Hungry Bachelors Club on, say, a movie theater marquee, this romantic comedy might bring to mind a gaggle of frat boys chasing girls and chugging beer.

“I was afraid of that,” admitted director Gregory Ruzzin in an interview a week before his film’s opening.

But as Ruzzin and Club’s ensemble cast can tell you, once you get beneath the misleading title you’ll find a hometown story - about family, acceptance and new beginnings. It is a world where mistakes are forgiven, racial lines are never drawn, friends are dependable and dreams are always within reach.

And the food is always delicious.

If all that seems a little too ideal, Ruzzin doesn’t mind the criticism. “My work has always been about making [the] world a better place by telling stories,” Ruzzin said. “Hopefully it rubs off on someone who sits through the movie, even if just a little bit.”

The title The Hungry Bachelors Club refers to Delmar Youngblood’s (Jorja Fox) dream of opening a restaurant. For years, Delmar’s home literally transforms into a hungry bachelors club, where her Cadillac-collecting brother Jethro (Peter Murnik), romantically insecure roommate Hortense (Suzanne Mara) and piano-playing mother Hannibal (Candice Azzara) are the regulars, constantly welcoming both friends and strangers to the feast.

Naturally, Delmar wants to extend her culinary talents and feel-good atmosphere to even more people. However, her Hungry Bachelors Club can’t open without adequate funds. An opportunity presents itself when Delmar gets offered $50,000 to be a surrogate mother.

Meanwhile, there’s plenty happening elsewhere. Hortense struggles to please her ambitious lawyer boyfriend, Stanley, while slacker writer Marlon (David Shackelford) pines for her. Jethro befriends drug addict Missy (Katherine Kendall) and ex-con Moses (Bill Nunn), who are focused on enriching the world around them after having been given a second chance. And Delmar, with more circumstances than one woman could seemingly handle, falls in love with Moses while feeding everyone well. The food and cooking are an extension of love, according to Ruzzin, who has thrown quite a few dinner parties himself.

“I grew up in an Italian family,” Ruzzin said. “I would go home and I wouldn’t leave the kitchen for a week…. So it was not unnatural for me to do this film. I’m famous for little dinner parties on Sunday nights as an excuse to see my friends. You express love for people in your life by feeding them and caring for them.”

Working in such familiar territory, Ruzzin didn’t quite need influence from other food-themed films like Soul Food and Like Water for Chocolate. The most difficult aspect of the film for the Detroit native and Santa Monica-based director would be crafting its close-knit relationships - and within a small town, to top it off. But Ruzzin got that prepackaged as well.

By uncanny coincidence, the three lead actresses and old friends - Fox, Mara and Kendall - all found themselves flying to Denver to shoot the film. “I got offered the role very suddenly,” said Fox, who plays Delmar. “In two days, we were on a plane to Colorado. I knew Katherine got offered the role within an hour, and at that point it didn’t matter what it was about, but I was going to be making a movie with good friends. It would have to be hard-core porn [for me] not to do it.”

“It was the best gift,” Mara added. “On most drunken Saturday nights, the three of us would think how great it would be if we all did a film together.”

Though the thought of simply working together would be enough for the actresses - who saw more of each other at casting calls than movie sets - playing good friends and acting out scenes that reflected their own lives were a doubly rewarding experience. Such a scene had Hortense, who diets profusely to please her boyfriend, confess that she wished to be beautiful and thin like Missy, played by Katherine Kendall.

“Katherine and I met when we were 17, and we lived together on East 16th Street in New York. I’ve always hated her and was jealous of her for being so thin,” Mara said. “When we had to do the scene, I said to Gregory, ‘Let’s not even rehearse, let’s just do it,’ and it came off perfectly on the first take.”

That may partially explain how natural and low-key this film feels when done by three friends who used to act in plays together, moved to Hollywood from the East Coast together and founded their own Los Angeles theater company, Honeypot Productions.

But even their close-knit friendship needed a little push at times in order for it to translate fully on the screen. So Ruzzin was far from a casual observer, sitting back in his director’s chair and watching the movie come together by itself.

“From the top down, the film feels very natural,” Mara said. “In one scene between Delmar and Hortense, it just wasn’t working, so Gregory (Ruzzin) let us take 45 minutes out of production so we could work on making the story move along. He is an actor’s director.”

According to Ruzzin, it is all a symbiotic relationship. “When I signed on to do the film, the principal casting had been completed, and I was handed these fantastic actors,” Ruzzin said. “To have these actresses already know each other and have all the things friends have before they play these parts, it reads much better than what we [would have been] able to create otherwise.”

But Ruzzin also had a clear picture in mind of what The Hungry Bachelors Club should be. With several complex storylines, including an interracial romance between Delmar and Moses, surrogate motherhood and the ubiquitous fear of commitment, it’s hard to pin down what the film is essentially about; Ruzzin pre-apologizes for getting carried away… showing that he’s obviously done his homework.

“The film shows people caring enough to get involved,” Ruzzin said. “Our community nowadays becomes more isolated, more mechanized, [so] that you can shop online and you don’t even need to leave your house for anything. Another example is a level of tolerance; we’re very intolerant of others’ peculiarities. We made sure the fact that Moses is a black man is a non-issue. That’s a better message than calling attention to it or we’d still be living in the past. He’s also an ex-con and most people wouldn’t give him the time of day, but in the film, people recognize his innate quality.”

Known for roles in films such as Do the Right Thing, Money Train and The Last Seduction, veteran character actor Nunn signed on because of a friendship with co-screenwriter Fred Dresch, who adapted Lynn Scott Meyers’ novel with Ron Ratliff. Playing a “regular guy” who happens to be both a talented cook and an ex-con was somewhat of a departure. Taking on a role that wasn’t carved from movie stereotypes like a cop or a lawyer, Nunn used his own life experiences and outlook to play a man who slowly discovers that many people out there are willing to help you forge a new beginning.

“I’ve actually had that experience,” Nunn said. “When family members visit and stay too long, they contribute by pulling their own weight, and Moses pulls it from day one. He’s not a burden or a deadweight. The people I helped out thought I was doing them a favor, but they were doing me the favor. I wanted my character to enrich the other people’s lives.”

Fox and Mara experienced the same phenomenon with their characters, drawing from their own lives the salient and subtle features that help flesh out an extremely level-headed woman in Delmar and a self-depriving woman in Hortense - not to mention the journey each character experiences within the film.

“Hortense already has an idea of what she wants her life to be,” Mara said. “She wants two kids and she’s so insecure with herself. There’s a nice arc in the film of her coming of age and becoming a wild woman, where she’s tearing into the chicken, letting it touch her lips.” (Throughout the rest of the film, Hortense doesn’t eat anything.)

“Delmar’s trying to hold everything together, and she’s just very cool,” Fox said. “She knows she’s gotta feed her son and fix the plumbing. She focuses on things that could happen instead of daydreaming. I like to think of myself as someone who gets things done.”

With characters that seem to exist on a parallel plane with the actors themselves, perhaps Ruzzin’s vision isn’t too far off from the real world.

Perhaps.

“The community in the film is something I’ve tried to create in my own life,” Ruzzin said, again speaking of his dinner parties. “The group is just open to who comes in and out, and inviting [new] people in isn’t a big issue. There’s more than just a societal level, but a culturally diverse one. I live in a white enclave on the Westside and everything is so segregated. Los Angeles is so segregated, it makes me feel uncomfortable because the variety of cultures is what makes life great.”