The plot is sparse, the sentiments common and the mise-en-scène (by Anand Tucker) little more than workmanlike; so Shopgirl lives or dies on whether you care about Mirabelle, the young woman Claire Danes is impersonating. According to the setup, she is a Vermont native who came to Los Angeles to be an artist, and who now spends her days behind the glove counter at Saks Fifth Avenue and her nights alone in a small, cheap apartment. You might wonder why her drawings are mostly a thick surface of charcoal, rubbed across the paper edge-to-edge, and how come her social circle is limited to her cat; and you will get some answers, eventually. But long before the film slips you that information, you need to ache for Mirabelle and hope for her, or else there simply will be no movie.

I say this as high praise--because Steve Martin, who wrote Shopgirl (both the screenplay and the novella on which it's based), now stands almost alone among contemporary American filmmakers in knowing what "character-driven" means, and because Claire Danes, from her first moment on the screen, makes Mirabelle into the bright, attractive friend you worry about.

She does it as a silent-movie actress would, or a dancer. She listens to the other performers not just with her ears and eyes but with her neck, stretching it, bobbing it, using it moment by moment to lean in to something she likes to hear or away from something that troubles her. When she's disappointed, she doesn't merely exhale, she deflates. When she smiles--really smiles--she also lifts, as if the expression were rising and spreading from the soles of her feet. In a lesser actress, this mime might seem artificial. But Danes is calculated only in keeping her features as still as the occasion allows, knowing that her broad, clear-skinned face, even at rest, is as legible as a billboard. Watching her, you think other actresses look half-alive at best. You even forget for a while that other actresses exist.

The conceit of Shopgirl is that Mirabelle herself has effortlessly and unintentionally made two men forget about other women. Jeremy (Jason Schwartzman) is her age- and class-appropriate lover--or at least he would be, if she could put up with his company. An unshaven, stringy-haired shlub who chatted her up in the laundromat, Jeremy is either unusually candid or else was raised by wolves. He is so unpolished, not to mention cheap, that a long period of hanging out with a rock band can actually help to socialize him. While Jeremy is being so improved, Mirabelle allows herself to fall in with the much older and wealthier Ray (Steve Martin), who knows how to invite her to restaurants and pay her small, playful compliments. In Martin's wonderfully subtle performance, in which he serves always as a foil for Danes, he is at first tentative in these attentions. He holds in check his extraordinary physical grace and instead plays up the weight that the years have added to his face and frame. He wants you to see that Ray knows Mirabelle could reject him, for the most irrefutable of reasons; and so, despite his money and sophistication, she has power over him, temporarily.

What makes Shopgirl so affecting (apart from Martin's willingness to let Schwartzman get all the laughs) are the undercurrents that run between the characters: the hints of fear and sadness that are present even in their kindnesses to one another. Let a passing moment, of no importance to the plot, serve as the example. When Mirabelle goes home to Vermont for a visit, her father (Sam Bottoms) beams with joy at her presence, but he can't think of anything to say to her. So the two, while loving each other, sit silent and apart.

As Martin says in his voiceover narration, that's life. But as he also says, sometimes love breaks through, if it's "tender and true." In other movies, that sentiment would come across as corn. In Shopgirl, it's something you can believe.

Claire Danes is the proof: tender and true.

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