Starring Claire Danes, Rupert Everett, and Billy Crudup. Rating unavailable.

Everyone plays a role. Some people are better at it than others, and some simply have the gift--or burden--of self-awareness. Stage Beauty's central character (the one to whom the title most closely applies) has a particular gift in his ability to portray the opposite sex with insight and conviction. As played by the sinewy, angular Billy Crudup, the real-life actor Ned Kynaston is invested with enough native arrogance to keep him from becoming an utterly tragic figure when the winds of Restoration make him the last, if best, of his kind.

The agent of change is his own dresser, an ambitious would-be thespian named Maria (Claire Danes, in her most poised adult role yet). She is futilely in love with Kynaston, although it's not clear if she would prefer to be with him or be him. For his part--or his part in off-stage theatrics, anyway--the actor is equally indeterminate. He has a long-standing, moderately hushed-up thing with the supercilious Duke of Buckingham (Ben Chaplin, getting away from his nice-guy roles), although he has been known to lend his more masculine favours to the right groupies.

What really throws him (and the movie) for a loop, though, is the intervention of Charles II, a towering figure with rock-star wig and a coterie of overgroomed spaniels. He's played with incomparable glee by Rupert Everett, who perfectly conveys both the world-weariness of exile and the sharp edge of revenge accompanying the exile's return. Seventeenth-century England has just seen a period of puritanical zeal, and Charles, aided by his curvy strumpet of a mistress (Zoe Tapper), is happy to see his revenge acted out on-stage. In the midst of all this Shakespearean folderol, few seem to notice that new celebrity Maria (now called Mrs. Margaret Hughes) is a terrible actor.

These ups and downs are deliciously handled by director Richard Eyre (Iris), working with Jeffrey Hatcher's zinger-laden adaptation of his own play, Compleat Female Stage Beauty. After a perfectly balanced first two acts, the film contrives its final third toward a jolly, hetero-happy ending, and there are certain touches, of body language and the other kind, that lend more modernity than the story needs. (I'm not sure about that Celtic-whirligig score, either.) But its dissection of gender, fame, and power--and where they meet with a whoosh--is never less than fascinating.

Most memorable may be the scene in which Kynaston teaches Maria the dynamics of the death scene in Othello from both male and female perspectives. This is in an empty theatre, just two people and a bed, enacting the metaphysics of sex. All About Adam and Eve, they could have called it, or maybe There's Some Desdemona in All of Us.