Hollywood swinging

And so the characters conjoin and disentangle in various weird permutations, some of them brief and wholly asexual, others distinctly charged with eroticism. Ian is devoted to Jane, and she loves him back, though it's not her style to hold on too tight -- she's more likely to cuff him as if he were a lion cub. But Ian nevertheless finds himself intensely attracted to Alex, and he flirts with her mischievously. As Nivola plays him, Ian is like a rock 'n' roll emissary on a special mission from England to spread joy and delight among the female population of America, leaving everyone happy and satiated and not the least bit jealous of one another -- he's a flesh-and-blood embodiment of the '60s ideal that few people who actually lived in the '60s could ever pull off.

McDormand's Jane is the locus of these mutable, ever-shifting interconnections. One of the most refreshing things about "Laurel Canyon" is that it doesn't present sex as a novelty enjoyed only by young people. Nor does it work overtime to tout the fact that its lead character is a sexually potent woman past the age of 40. Jane, as McDormand plays her, simply is, and that's what makes the performance so marvelous.

Jane isn't one of those characters who clings to her past to the point of ridiculousness; instead, she moves forward through the decades while wholly accepting how her past has shaped her. She struts through the movie in worn concert T-shirts and sleek leather pants, but they never come off as youthful affectations -- she looks as comfortable (and as sexy) in them as if she were wearing PJs.

McDormand has perfected the art of the lived-in performance. She's astonishingly beautiful here, as well as youthful-looking, not because her skin is perfect or her hair is spectacular, but because everything about the way she moves, about her expression, gives the sense of a woman who's looking constantly forward rather than back. She doesn't play Jane as the older woman who's lucky to have landed a cute young guy; all that's clear is that she's got something he wants, something wholly desirable -- her aura of confidence is the most charismatic thing about her.

The movie's dynamic, its sense of momentum and energy, comes from the way Cholodenko and her actors toss out all the crapola that we've been programmed to believe about aging, sexuality, about just plain living. Jane is as vulnerable, and as flawed, as any other human being, but the last thing she's interested in is actually becoming her flaws. (The movie's one misstep is a speech Jane gives at the end, where she apologizes to Sam for not having been the world's greatest mother. Jane's confession is unnecessary because there are plenty of moments in McDormand's performance where she shows, either through body language or just a brief, mournful glint in her soft brown eyes, that she's fully aware of where she's fallen short.)

"Laurel Canyon" isn't a tremendously funny movie, yet Cholodenko infuses it with great good humor. Her first feature, "High Art," was skillful and intense, but "Laurel Canyon" throws off a much more seasoned, relaxed confidence. I can't recall a single line in the picture that made me laugh out loud, and yet I recall almost the whole movie as unrolling with ease and affection and liveliness, even amid the weird tensions and heartaches of the characters. Wally Pfister's cinematography suits the movie's mood perfectly: This isn't a harsh, garishly lit Los Angeles, but a cautiously romantic one that's still dusted with the shimmery dust motes of old Hollywood -- those hardy, luminous little things that have survived decades of rising and falling starlets, big-money movie deals, rock 'n' roll excess and all sorts of dashed dreams.

The characters in "Laurel Canyon" do unorthodox things that are sometimes a little startling. Yet those moments are always brushed with tenderness, as opposed to selfishness. Cholodenko neither romanticizes nor demonizes her characters' unconventionality. All she seeks is to show us is that to get through life, it's simply necessary to find a way of living -- a quest that means much more than striving toward a certain lifestyle or a specific job. Her "Laurel Canyon" is a pure L.A. movie, in its look, sound and feel. The West Coast used to represent the place you'd go to find yourself. But Cholodenko's L.A. is a state of mind, a wave of movement and sound that you could feel as acutely on the Alaskan tundra as in the Hollywood hills. Good vibrations always travel.

• View blog reactions