While Rob is quick to chide his employees for their music snobbery, which often seems to be merely an excuse to mock customers, he's got a bad streak of it himself. In one scene, he stands by, amused, as Barry refuses to sell a rare Captain Beefheart LP to a customer who's practically begging for it, only to turn around and offer it to another customer for a measly 40 bucks. When it comes to love, Cusack is terrific at that lovesick gob-smacked look: It really kicks in as he gazes at Catherine Zeta-Jones, as his college girlfriend Charlie -- his eyes become so liquid you could swim in them. But he doesn't use that look to endear himself to us, or to seduce us, as much as he does to signal Rob's romantic cluelessness. He may be smitten, but it's a shallow, cowardly kind of regard -- the kind you reserve for the most desirable prize of a girl, not necessarily the one who can bring out the best in you.

"High Fidelity" has plenty going for it: The acting is great, the jokes are funny, but oh! the music. The songs are so well chosen -- never the most obvious choices, but always interesting ones -- that they sometimes catch you up short. In an early scene, Dick starts out his morning at the store by putting on Belle & Sebastian's lovely, mournful "Seymour Stein," only to have it snapped off by Barry, who insists on hearing Katrina and the Waves' "Walking on Sunshine." Later, Rob tells his co-workers that he's going to sell five copies of an obscure band just by playing one striking track, and sure enough, we see a store full of guys with dubious facial hair suddenly bobbing their heads and asking, "What is this, man?" Rob, Dick and Barry's obsessiveness is the movie's constant gag, and yet it's never in doubt how much pleasure they get from the music. You can't blame them for wanting to have a soundtrack for their lives; life would be way too quiet without it.

But it may be the constant presence of music, more than the actual thing itself, that gives "High Fidelity" its real shape. The store (which was built lovingly on a soundstage, and includes albums from DeVincentis' own collection) looks like a veritable Candyland for pop-music addicts; given the choice between visiting either of two mythical lands, I'd take Championship Vinyl over Oz any day.

There's also a touching kind of earnestness in the way Rob lovingly cleans 45s with a Discwasher pad as he tells us his tale of woe, or in the way he declares that, yeah, he's read "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "Love in the Time of Cholera" -- but "Cash," by Johnny Cash, is his favorite book. Or in the way that Rob, Dick and Barry, all smitten with a sexy lounge singer (the effortlessly alluring Lisa Bonet), each fantasize aloud not about sleeping with her but about the much-more-elusive pleasures that being romantically involved with her might bring: Rob wonders if she might someday write a song that would include one of their little in-jokes; Dick muses that maybe she'd include a picture of him on the sleeve of her next CD, nothing elaborate, just something blurry in the background.

And when Rob at one point quietly declares his love for Charlie Rich's "Behind Closed Doors," you recognize that for all his snobbishness, for all his annoying waffling on issues of commitment, his heart beats true. It may be wrong to use pop music as a kind of shield to protect you from experience, but it seems wholly healthy to view it as a romantic training ground, a place where all kinds of hopes and desires are dreamed about, obsessed over, test-driven. As the Beatles once sang, "There's a place." "High Fidelity" tells us where it is: right in the groove.

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