Mathieu Amalric can loll on the floor — shirt unbuttoned, feet bare, face stubbly, cigarette smoldering away — and not appear ridiculous. This is a particular gift of the French, and Mr. Amalric, a film actor making his American stage debut with “Fight or Flight (Le Moral des Ménages),” presented by French Institute Alliance Française, has it all wrapped up in a pleasantly scruffy package.

The director Stéphanie Cléau has adapted this short play from an early novel by the Prix Goncourt-nominated author Éric Reinhardt. Mr. Amalric, an actor and director best known for a villainous turn in a James Bond film and as the paralyzed protagonist in Julian Schnabel’s “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” plays Manuel, a songwriter in the Serge Gainsbourg mode. Manuel has survived a stifling middle-class childhood with a salesman father, who once dreamed of being a pilot, and a henpecking mother, the kind of housewife “who totally drags society down” with her “phony poverty fetish.” (The script has a nasty streak of misogyny that the production doesn’t do much to temper.)

Manuel describes the indignities of listening to his father’s work problems and choking down his mother’s zucchini casserole to a series of semiclad women — or maybe they’re all the same woman — played by Anne-Laure Tondu. (Convincing beautiful naked women to listen to your grousing must be another Gallic talent.) Ms. Tondu, wearing rather more clothing, also plays Manuel’s mother, wife, lost love, rebellious daughter and a pilot who flies a remote-controlled helicopter.

The complaints that Manuel voices feel minor and petulant rather than consequential — assuming you can understand them. The monologues and dialogue are spoken very briskly in French, and at Florence Gould Hall the English supertitles were projected so dimly as to be almost illegible, so the piece has more to offer fluent Francophones. But Mr. Amalric’s ample charisma and his ability to convey ennui and disgust need no translation.