I caught Ryan Gosling’s Lars and the Real Girl recently, and while it has absolutely no sort of breakout potential from a box office point-of-view (the quasi-floppage of this spring’s taut Fracture, deserving of a better fate, confirmed that), it’s quite a good little movie — not flat-out great, but definitely teetering on the edge of something special. The narrative situation, described in the link above, seems to lend itself to ha-ha comedy, but the parallel metaphor in Nancy Oliver’s debut feature script is thinly, artfully applied and Gosling knocks another performance out of the park. The movie treats his delusion and emotions seriously, so while laughs are wrung from the blank-faced reactions of those around Lars, the audience’s investment with him is sincere.