The most promising student in Tripp's creative writing seminar, James Leer (Tobey Maguire), would be casting a funereal shadow over everyone he encounters if there weren't something so oddly lighthearted about his suicidal mien; he appears always to be on the verge of cracking a smile. Tripp's with-child sweetie, Sara (Frances McDormand), is none other than the chancellor at this small college in Pittsburgh, although from her behavior you'd deduce that she is, at best, a residence hall adviser.

Then there's Tripp's needy, reedy, randomly randy editor, Crabtree (Robert Downey Jr.), ostensibly in town for a dippy writer's conference but in fact more interested in sneaking a look at Tripp's work in progress and in furthering his relationship with a promising transvestite (Michael Cavadias) he snared on the plane; dorky Walter (Richard Thomas), who has, most improbably, ended up as 1) chairman of the English department, 2) Sara's husband and 3) in possession of a jacket worn by Marilyn Monroe on her wedding day; Q (Rip Torn), a literary lion out to make hay while the book reviews shine; Vernon (Richard Knox), a lunatic who seems to have it in for Tripp; and Vernon's spaceball popsie (the always incandescent Jane Adams).

Plotwise -- though it hardly matters -- there's also a stolen car, a deceased pet and a precocious young thang ("Dawson Creek's" Katie Holmes) eager to slip into the seam of Tripp's rattled existence, somewhere between his departed wife and conflicted lover.

Ambling about in frumpy professor togs that range from pilly sweaters to his wife's bathrobe, glasses slipping down his nose, firing up joints like torches to illuminate the gloaming, Tripp grumps through the weekend to an ending most satisfactory to all but the audience: It's contrived, it's schmaltzy and it undercuts the genial madness of the rest of the film.

But that, too, hardly matters, as the script (by Steve Kloves, from Michael Chabon's novel) gets kinetic treatment from director Curtis Hanson, still throwing off sparks from "L.A. Confidential."

For a film about writers, "Wonder Boys" crackles with energy; there are two swirling, dizzying, hilarious set pieces in which those most tiresome of movie conventions, a car chase (kind of) and a collision, simply pop. (Downey's the driver in one of them; it's the funniest auto mishap since Jeff Bridges' stoned crack-up in "The Big Lebowski." And aren't we all just so much better off with the brilliant Downey in Corcoran State Prison for substance abuse?)