Even in a world where the flash and razzle-dazzle of CGI has supplanted the rather pedestrian fascination of magic, first-hand conjuring and sleight-of-hand still holds a lure because there’s a part of all of us that wants to believe in something bigger than and beyond “just” us, even if it’s only a diversionary bafflement. Adapted from a short story penned by Steven Millhauser, the period-piece drama The Illusionist delves into this world, wrapping its doomed love narrative around a dogged, cat-and-mouse pursuit.

Set in Vienna at the turn of the 19th century, the film opens with the public arrest of our populist protagonist, and then flashes back on a forbidden adolescent love affair between an aristocratic girl and a cabinetmaker’s son. That peasant, of course, after wandering the Orient and other areas for 15 years, has grown up to be Eisenheim (Edward Norton), a popular traveling magician who has transformed the negation and withholding of his adolescence into a rigidly impenetrable showman’s persona — charismatic but at the same time enigmatic.

Put by Crown Prince Leopold (Rufus Sewell) on Eisenheim’s trail to expose him as a fraud is Inspector Uhl (Paul Giamatti), a working class detective who has endeared himself to his ruthlessly ambitious superior by way of his prudence and kept-boy propriety. Eisenheim, you see, represents a dual threat to Leopold’s grand and violent political designs, both in the abstract because he possesses an apparent power that Leopold cannot invoke and, more immediately, because he seems to be rekindling an affair with the betrothed Sophie (Jessica Biel), his childhood flame. When parlor games and play-nice debasement for the patrician class fail to save Sophie from Leopold’s jealous rage, Eisenheim sets into motion an elaborate plan of obfuscation and reprisal, necessitating his arrest by Inspector Uhl. But who truly has the upper hand?

As directed by commercial veteran and sophomore feature filmmaker Neil Burger (Interview with the Assassin), who makes fine use of composer Philip Glass’ score — a tightly dizzying upward spiral — The Illusionist is made over fairly significantly from its original source material, with new characters invented wholesale and a more linear plot cooked up to up the intrigue factor. Burger still pays considerable attention to the film’s look, though, working in auto-chromatic frames that are blurred a bit around the edges, lending the movie a certain bedtime fairy tale feel.

If there’s no small amount of slack to the story, the film’s strong suit is its acting. Norton brings a great certitude to his performance as Eisenheim, full of cleanly delineated movements and deliberate pauses and silences that convey as much about the man as anything he says outright. Giamatti, meanwhile, avoids all the normal clichés of unctuous, hip-pocket lawmen, imbuing in Uhl the silently conflicted deportment of a diligent plebian who simultaneously recognizes it’s rarely what you know but rather whom you know. When Eisenheim, in a rare, flashpoint moment of anger, asks Uhl if he’s entirely corrupt, the inspector instinctively spits back, “No, not entirely, no.” It’s this sequence and others between Norton and Giamatti that truly sing, such as a scene when Uhl attempts to cajole Eisenheim into revealing the secret of a particular trick, and later when he summons the magician to a restaurant to gauge the nature of his relationship to Sophie. The depth here — the class sympathies and conflict — is literary in nature, and certainly a welcome infusion to what is otherwise a fairly trivial story.

The Illusionist is ultimately a somewhat light entertainment, the revelations of its sleight-of-hand finale tipped fairly early on. Whether that diminishes the to-scale joy of the efforts of Norton and Giamatti is a matter of personal taste, but the film reminds one that magic comes in all sorts of filmic packages, big and small. (Yari Film Group, PG-13, 107 mins.)