Has Kevin Smith grown up?

Kevin Smith has a problem, but it's not the one you think.

His new film, "Jersey Girl," opens today, but it has been a water cooler topic since August, when a little film called "Gigli" made the kind of pop-culture belly-flop that comes around only once a decade. Because "Jersey Girl," like "Gigli," has Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez in its cast, Smith -- the voluble, profane, working-class iconoclast who made the cult hits "Clerks," "Chasing Amy," and "Dogma" -- has been on the defensive for months. Now that the media entity we know as Bennifer has receded into its constituent parts, will anyone even want to see the two in another movie?

Wrong question, because Lopez survives all of 15 minutes in "Jersey Girl." Her character, the wife of a high-powered Manhat-

tan publicist named Ollie Trinke (Affleck), dies in childbirth; the bulk of the film jumps ahead to follow the relationship between Ollie and his 7-year-old daughter (played by newcomer Raquel Castro) while grandpa George Carlin and love interest Liv Tyler look on from the sidelines. The question, in other words, isn't whether "Jersey Girl" will be another "Gigli." The question is whether Kevin Smith's aggressively devoted fan base will think he has sold his soul to Hallmark.

"You try to explain it to them," says the affable, bearlike Smith with a sigh, describing online conversations -- all right, flame wars -- he has endured on his popular View Askew website. " `Look, dude,' " he says, speaking to an invisible online 14-year-old fan. " `Me making a movie about having a kid is not really a sellout, it's me. Me making a movie that I don't write and that's about a subject that means nothing to me, that's a sellout. Maybe I'll get there, but this ain't it.' "

The director is in town beating the PR bushes for the new film; he sits in a no-smoking room in a Boston hotel and chain-smokes menthol cigarettes. The window is open on a sublime late winter day, and Smith, wearing owlish glasses and a team jacket emblazoned with the name of his 4-year-old daughter, Harley Quinn, is parsing his many and varied fans.

"We've got the `Chasing Amy' people, which this movie is definitely in line with. There's the `Dogma' people, who are the lapsed Catholics. People who swear `Mallrats' was their favorite movie ever. People who say the only good movie I ever made was `Clerks.' But, yeah, the 14-year-old boys are the cats who'll be leading the sellout cry."

And not only boys. "There was a girl I spoke to at a college round table in Miami," Smith continues. "She was hard-core into my movies, and I definitely picked up that she ain't quite there with this one. And finally I just said, `You didn't like it, did you?' And she said, `No, I really didn't.' She was 18, something like that. And I said, `Look, I'm not trying to put you down, but in 10 years you'll like it a lot more."

Could the potty-mouthed man-child who gave us "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back" be maturing? Well . . . yes. At 33, Smith is a world-class raconteur, and the conversation this afternoon touches on "The Passion of the Christ" ("I don't fetishize the death of Christ," says the Catholic-raised director. "I'd much rather see a movie where he multiplies the loaves and the fishes. Apparently I'm in a minority.") and his upcoming screen adaptation of "The Green Hornet" comic ("Not everyone is familiar with the story. They know it's the dude in the mask, they know Kato, and that's about it. That's good. I don't want to have people go, `Wait a minute, Spiderman doesn't have organic web shooters man.' ")

But he keeps circling back to the seismic, ordinary changes wrought by marriage (to journalist Jennifer Schwalbach) and fatherhood. Like any doting dad, he loves a good anecdote, telling of his toddler's recent demands to go to Texas. "I was like `What the [expletive] do you know about Texas?' Then I was watching `SpongeBob' with her and Sandy the Squirrel is from Texas, so suddenly Texas became a very romantic place that she needed to get to. I was trying to tell her, `You're not gonna see any squirrels in Texas, hon. Particularly underwater.' "

"Jersey Girl" may be the most heartfelt Kevin Smith movie yet, but it's not fully Lifetime-ready. Not with Carlin blistering the edges of the screen, or with Affleck and Tyler's romp in the shower, or, most tellingly, with the scene in which harried single dad Affleck finally snaps and screams at his daughter, "You sucked my life away and I want it back!" That's an intentionally awful moment, if one to which any honest parent can relate, and the star initially balked.

"Ben was on unsteady ground about it," says Smith. "He said, `You know, I may lose them,' and I said `You're gonna lose them, you have to lose them. Anybody with a heart is not going to like you in that moment, because you're expressing something that people have felt. And then your job is to make sure they come back to you.' "

If they come at all. After the Ben-and-Jen follies of last year, there's real concern that the public may be burned out on the actor. "I saw `Gigli,' and, look, it ain't good," says Smith. "I don't know that I would have necessarily played somebody on the West Coast with an East Coast accent, but that's just me. But I don't think Ben got a fair shake.

"The good thing is that we're poised to be the comeback picture. More importantly, if the movie works, that man will owe me so much. I'll get him to work for peanuts from now until the end of time if this pans out. So this could really work out for me."

Regardless of the receding media fury or the upcoming fan firestorm, Smith is simply happy with the movie he has made. "The box office will be whatever it's gonna be, but a movie lives long beyond that," he says. "Ten years after `Clerks,' that movie still has playability. I want the same thing for `Jersey Girl.' That [expletive] girl in the college Q&A, 10 years from now the movie will mean more to her. And that means more to me than whatever the opening box office will be."

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com