Directed by Robert Altman. Starring Neve Campbell, Malcolm McDowell, and James Franco. Rated PG.

Throughout his long career, director Robert Altman has been responsible for many titles (M*A*S*H, Nashville, Príªt-í -Porter, McCabe & Mrs. Miller) that have been called irreverent, stately, solid, and slapdash--with few critics agreeing on which, exactly, deserve which of those adjectives. (Okay, everyone agrees that Nashville was a masterpiece and Príªt-í -Porter wasn't so hot.)

The Company, a video-shot effort about the ballet world that plays more like documentary than drama, is also an obvious audience divider. This time around, though, instead of taking on too much--think of all the subplots that spider-webbed Short Cuts--Altman has kept it stark and simple, his touch as light as a dancer's softest landing.

Neve Campbell pressed the director to make this project, which she worked up with Barbara Turner. The credit actually reads "written by", but screenplay is too strong a word for what we are dealing with here, which is essentially a season in the life of a slightly fictionalized version of Chicago's Joffrey Ballet. Canada's Campbell, a balletomane before she joined her Party of Five--and the only actor amongst this corps de ballet--plays Ry Ryan, a member of the company with perhaps only medium-sized talent and ambition. (That's not according to her pushy stage mother, of course.)

At the other end of the temperament scale is the Joffrey's artistic director, with an emphasis on the artistic. Perhaps to keep the amateurs around him juiced up a few notches (but more likely because he's riffing on real-life drama king Gerald Arpino), Malcolm McDowell plays the fictional Alberto Antonelli so over the top that you don't know whether to marvel at his vision or wish he would just go away, fast. The dancers, administrators, stagehands, and choreographers (with bigshots Lar Lubovitch and Robert Desrosiers as something like themselves) have pretty much the same feeling.

What we get here is an environment otherwise free of melodrama. Ry offers us the only glimpse into anyone's private life: her part-time job at a techno club; the care she gives her aching feet; and the relatively conflict-free connection she makes with a young chef (James Franco) who admires her from afar, and closer up, too. Ambivalence, pain, injury, inspiration, boredom, and stamina are the mainstays of these lives, with moments of sheer poetry--and the only beautiful staging and photography seen in The Company--punctuating the slow-moving intensity.

In by far the most exalted sequence, Ry does an outdoor pas de deux with Domingo Rubio to a sinewy, chamber-music version of "My Funny Valentine". The dance is already pretty steamy when a freak storm threatens to cancel the whole show, set in a Chicago park, and the will-they-or-won't-they tension neatly sums up the film's subtle potency. Some people, of course, get up and leave when it rains, but what do the others get, besides wet, when they stay?