A made-in-Boston action comedy teaming Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, “The Instigators” knows how to score laughs amid serious subjects like psychiatrists, municipal corruption, alcoholism and self-harm.

Damon’s Rory is a desperate dad, behind in child support and in major debt. Affleck’s Cobby is a seriously depressed ex-con. Their planned robbery goes very bad, very quickly.

Laughs come, Damon, 53, said in a joint Zoom interview, “Because it’s all in the tone of the movie — and that is what Doug (Liman, his ‘The Bourne Identity’ director) really does so well.”

That tone is there, he said, when you “really look at where these two characters are: Rory is flirting with this idea of self-harm. Cobby can’t start his own motorcycle because he drinks so much that he has to get an eight-year-old to take the breathalyzer test. These are not people who have it all figured out. And that’s really the movie.”

“Instigators” has its biggest co-star in Boston itself. Filming took place in Cambridge, Winthrop and Quincy.

“I love coming back here,” said Damon who with Ben Affleck produced the movie. “I’ve come back a few times during my career and whether it’s a comedy like this, or more serious like ‘Departed’ or ‘Good Will Hunting,’ I really want it to be special.

“I wish I could do every movie here. I love it here. I love the people. I feel very at home here. I just don’t want to overstay my welcome.”

A successful career is about choices. What has Damon learned about himself by selecting the roles he’s played?

“I got a great piece of advice from my mother actually. I was 32 and was offered the Farrelly brothers’ ‘Stuck on You.’ I liked those guys so much and was weighing that comedy against another much more serious movie. It was going to be on another continent with six months of living in the jungle. A very tough movie the actor in me felt I should do.

“And my mom was talking to me and she goes, ‘You know, it’s okay to have fun and do this job.’ That was the best piece of advice. I really do feel the older I get that you can do this job out of a place of pain. Or a place of joy. Each are very profound and powerful places to come from.

“But it works really well out of joy.  That was a very constructive thing to hear at that point in my life.

“Then I went to that movie — and I met my wife by coincidence! It turned out to completely change my path in a wonderful way.”

“The Instigators” opens Friday in theaters, and streams on AppleTV+ Aug. 9