Fans of Payne’s movies — including “Citizen Ruth,” “Election,” “The Descendants,” “Sideways” and “Nebraska” — will be gratified to know that “The Holdovers” reunites the director with his “Sideways” star Paul Giamatti. Here, Giamatti plays Paul Hunham, a chronically disgruntled classics teacher who is but one of several misanthropes Payne has turned into lovable, if grouchy, leading men. When Hunham is tasked with looking after a small group of “holdovers” during the holiday break, he accepts his fate with grumpy resignation. Eventually, the group’s number is reduced to one: a gangly, smart-mouthed junior named Angus Tully, played by newcomer Dominic Sessa in an exceptionally impressive debut. Joined by the school’s cook, Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), Hunham and Tully form an ad hoc family unit over the course of several days, during which they’ll test each other’s endurance and assumptions about each other and, in Tully’s case, begin to understand the dynamics of unearned privilege.

Working from a script by David Hemingson, Payne brings his prodigious talents to bear on a story he was born to tell, with actors who infuse every scene with just the right balance of comedy and sadness. Giamatti gleefully leans into Hunham’s pedantry, whether in the service of fondly referencing the Punic Wars or insulting his most lackadaisical students, but his vulnerability and loneliness are never far from the surface. Similarly, Tully’s Holden Caulfield act is clearly masking a hidden sadness, which comes into focus in one of the movie’s finest scenes, set at a fancy restaurant in Boston. Mary, in the midst of her own grief, could easily have been marginalized and magical-ized in a surrogate father-son psychodrama, but Hemingson and Payne give her pride of place in a storyline suffused with loss, tenderness and the richness of lived-in detail.

Randolph plays every beat with just the right comic or tragic tonal nuance, as does Giamatti. In Sessa, discovered by the filmmakers as a member of the drama club at Deerfield Academy, one of the schools where “The Holdovers” was filmed, Payne has found a star in the making. With a shaggy head of hair reminiscent of Andover-era JFK Jr., and an expressive face that would look right at home on an Etruscan fresco, Sessa delivers an alert, utterly grounded performance, holding his own with his far more experienced co-stars. To go into detail about the set pieces that make up “The Holdovers” — which, like so many Payne movies, features a road trip — would be to spoil the surprises the director doles out with flawless timing. Suffice it to say that his talent for caustic humor, authentic emotion and thoroughly satisfying narrative resolutions continues unabated.

So, too, does his gift for marrying sound, silence and visuals to build an entire world: Although “The Holdovers” has its share of period-centric needle drops, most of the music has been composed by Mark Orton, who nods to the folk, jazz and pop inflections of the era to lovely, lyrical effect. Damien Jurado’s “Silver Joy” provides a recurring motif, recalling the wintry wistfulness of musicians Jackson C. Frank or Bert Jansch. Filmed in subdued tones of burnished browns, “The Holdovers” might best be described as the movie version of that favorite pair of corduroys that miraculously still fit: stylish, if a little worn in places, softened by time and made more generous by the life lived inside them. Curmudgeonly and charming, unsentimental and deeply felt, antically funny and deceptively humane, “The Holdovers” would probably even pass muster with Hunham himself. It’s a movie that feels like one of his lost classics, patiently waiting to be found when it’s somehow been here all along.

R. At area theaters. Contains strong language, some drug use and brief sexuality. 133 minutes.