You certainly wouldn't expect to get the small, quirky, comic marvel that is Wonder Boys, which has a little gunplay, a little sex, the funniest car crash I've seen in a very long time, and characters you will not soon forget.

Based on Michael Chabon's novel of the same name, Wonder Boys takes place over a long weekend at a university in Pittsburgh. It's the school's annual Wordfest, which brings members of the outside literary world -- writers, agents, editors -- onto campus for readings, lectures, and socializing. Professor Grady Tripp's (Michael Douglas) weekend begins badly. His wife leaves him, and his lover, the university chancellor (Frances McDormand), announces that she is pregnant with his child. Tossed into the mix are Grady's gay editor from New York, Crabtree (Robert Downey Jr.), and James Leer (Tobey Maguire), Tripp's most gifted but troubled student.

(Full disclosure: I know these people. Not metaphorically, but really. At least the people their characters are based upon. I taught in the English department at the University of Pittsburgh for a number of years when Chabon was a grad student there. These characters and a variation of this situation are quite identifiable to anyone who was around at the time. Doesn't make them any less funny, however.)

Tripp is the original "Wonder Boy." His first novel, The Arsonist's Daughter, was a raging success and helped propel his editor, Crabtree, to glory in the publishing business. Seven years later, he's still working on his second book, which has reached phone book size with no end in sight. Crabtree's in town to put the heat on Tripp, with an eye toward shoring up his own now-shaky career. But Tripp has descended into an academic sludgepool -- writing simply to put words on paper, teaching with little enthusiasm, smoking pot incessantly, jumping from one relationship to another. He is no longer a wonder boy; he's just wondering what to do next.

Douglas is a revelation in this role. He plays the self-absorbed and cynical Tripp with just the right mix of detachment and vulnerability. It's a far cry from the rich creep roles he's done so often lately. He plays a sardonic schlub, and it's probably the best acting of his career.

Downey is also good, and very funny. "I don't fit in with the new corporate culture," he says to Tripp at one point. "What's that?" Tripp asks. "Oh, I don't know," he replies, "competency?"

At the core of the story is the mysterious James Leer, a talented, sexually ambivalent, perhaps suicidal student, whose stories of life on the edge (he tells Tripp he lives at the bus station) are the stuff of great fiction, literally. He is pulled into the whirlpool of Tripp's world, a nascent wonder boy with a novel in his backpack, headed into a weekend that will change his life forever. Wonder Boys won't change your life, but it is filled with surprises and delights: laugh-out-loud one-liners, great sight gags, academic humor and, almost inevitably, a sense of loss and poignancy. But it all works somehow, and coming out of Hollywood these days, that's a wonder in itself.