"Stage Beauty"

Maria borrows Kynaston's props and costumes at night and runs off to perform the role of Desdemona herself, in a thrown-together production in a seedy tavern -- the Restoration equivalent of underground theater. But before long, her cover is blown. When, at the urging of his mistress, the bodaciously pleasing Nell Gwyn (played with curvaceous audacity by newcomer Zoë Tapper), King Charles II (Rupert Everett) makes a decree that men shall never again play women on the London stage, Maria becomes a star. And Ned Kynaston not only loses his livelihood, but audiences forget they ever cared for him in the first place -- perhaps the cruelest injustice you can inflict on an actor.

Good theater directors usually know a lot about how to work with actors, but their vision doesn't always translate to film. Eyre doesn't have that problem: He recognizes that a movie screen isn't 2-D but infinitely, sometimes maddeningly, multidimensional in terms of the layers of detail you can add -- he doesn't clutter it with too many or give it the impoverished, deprived appearance of having too few. His Restoration London is none too clean, and yet cinematographer Andrew Dunn takes care not to make it too dismally grimy, either. And he has fun with the occasional telling detail, including, in a bustling street scene, a fine graphic depiction of a "steaming heap." (If the term is a cliché now, it hasn't always been.)

Eyre captures the mood of late 17th century London, or at least what we want to believe that mood was like, with his colorfully dappled mix of characters. Hugh Bonneville (who played the young John Bayley, marvelously, in Eyre's first movie, "Iris") shows up as a fiddling-and-diddling Samuel Pepys, always lurking in the shadows with his furtive scribbling -- the kind of nuisance nobody ever wants to have around but sure is grateful for 350 years later. And Everett, in his country-music-star wig and devilish mustache, makes a dashingly swishy Charles II. He may swan about, but it's screwball swanning: He's a vision of over-the-top splendor as he strides down palace corridors, his famous spaniels dustmopping madly around his legs.

"Stage Beauty" is great fun, but it's fun with an air of melancholy about it. It's a love story woven of frazzled golden threads, one in which happiness for the two lovers is anything but guaranteed. Danes and Crudup are wonderful, both together and apart. Danes -- who, not so long ago, gave us the most moving screen Juliet we may ever see -- is maturing as an actress without becoming harder or sharper. She hasn't lost that teenage softness of hers, and perhaps she never will -- her features still have that quality of rubbery vulnerability.

Even so, Danes cultivates a fierceness here that we haven't seen in her before. Maria, sensing how lost and troubled the deposed Kynaston is, rescues him from the life of debasement he's sunk into. She spirits him away to the country, where they shack up in a cozily spacious cottage. That's the setting for one of the movie's loveliest scenes: Finally recognizing that she can't wrest Kynaston into the role of the man, she looks to him to find out more about being a woman. She seduces him, gently ("I've never been with a woman -- except myself," he tells her, a funny line you can't bring yourself to laugh at), and together they try to figure out what makes a man a man and a woman a woman. She straddles him authoritatively, looking down at him; he slips beneath her, melting under her gaze. "Who am I now?" they repeatedly ask each other, a question they're no closer to answering by the end of the scene (or the movie) than they were at the beginning.

Kynaston is often deeply unlikable, but we care desperately about him. Crudup pushes the limits of our patience with his depiction of Kynaston's sourness and jagged desperation, but we still feel protective of him. When, challenged to deliver a few of Othello's lines before the king -- dared, in other words, to be a man -- his masculinity (which is as much a part of him as his womanliness) fails him. We feel his horror and his shame as much as he does.

In the end, Maria doesn't really teach Kynaston to be a man any more than he teaches her to be a woman. But they unveil for each other an essential truth: Men and women are historically at odds, but the best parts of us often seem to belong to the opposition. Which means that to be our best selves, in bed or anywhere, we can't always be defined by what's between our legs.

And right there, maybe, is one of the great secrets of acting, one that "Stage Beauty" points toward. To become another person, you don't necessarily have to know yourself, which is just one of the ways in which acting is a dangerous profession. But the better you know yourself -- including the parts that belong to the opposition -- the braver you can be when it comes to unsheathing your feelings. "A woman playing a woman -- where's the trick in that?" Kynaston asks indignantly in "Stage Beauty," and he's right in that it's no trick at all.

The final question of the movie, one that Maria poses to Kynaston, is "Who are you now?" His response is almost giddy with helplessness: "I don't know." The only certainty for Maria and Kynaston is that it's a mixed-up, mumbled-up, shook-up world. Sometimes the only thing that makes sense is a man in a dress.

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