Damon – who is concurrently starring in John Grisham’s The Rainmaker – inhabits the title role with a relentlessly watchable ferocity. Will is an extraordinary young man torn between his past and future. The film focuses on a period of several months in which researchers at M.I.T. discover Will’s mathematical genius and photographic memory, Will discovers love (with the charming Minnie Driver), Will is finally forced to confront (with the help of a psychologist played by Robin Williams) the demons of his past, and Will decides whether he will continue as a Whitmanesque working-class man who has the soul of a poet and the camaraderie of the blue-collar friends with whom he’s grown up, or let his gifts carry him to any one of a number of professional heights and a life seemingly without bounds.

That is the plot. But that insufficiently describes what Good Will Hunting is about.

One of its most startling aspects is that, for all the exceptional gambits and ambitions of the story, Good Will Hunting bristles with a sense of reality and romance with which most audiences will identify. There is an uplifting wholeness at work here that transcends the sometimes formulaic parts, bursting from the screen in a heady mixture of powerfully written scenes, arresting performances, and Van Sant’s galvanizing fluidity of style, emotional insight for the material, and grace in working with the actors.

Williams gives, arguably, the performance of his career as the therapist who wants Will to understand his past, keep his soul, and liberate himself to a new future. They finally meet on a common ground of vulnerability as Will brings the therapist’s own private pain into the light, and in the end help one another break through. (It’s time to note that, more than anyone making films today, Van Sant seems to understand and movingly convey male vulnerability. Good Will Hunting, like My Own Private Idaho and Drugstore Cowboy before it, keenly portrays the particularities of male friendships, foibles, strengths, and weaknesses.)

Perhaps most exciting is the fact that Good Will Hunting was written by such young men and directed by someone who has, until now, been seen as a suspicious eccentric. This is a film in which just about everything goes right, comes together, and takes on a deeply felt and memorable life. Even its manipulations are honest, earned, and – though without moral presumptions – for a larger purpose. There’s wit; there’s operatic sentiment. You laugh; you cry. This reviewer, as I expect will be true of many moviegoers, found himself delighted to have been played, if like a violin, at least as a Stradivarius.