The reliable William H. Macy plays Walt Price, a film director who winds up in the tiny town of Waterford, Vermont, after some undisclosed scandal sends his crew packing from their last location. Philip Seymour Hoffman is, right, terrific as Joseph Turner White, the screenwriter who's under pressure to retool his script in response to production glitches. Alec Baldwin (who comes across as an unflattering parody of himself) is the self-absorbed superstar actor with a thing for teenaged girls, Sarah Jessica Parker is the overpriced starlet who suddenly refuses to appear topless, and David Paymer is Marty the producer, who shows up on the scene to try and keep events under control. Among the locals, Rebecca Pidgeon is the bookstore owner and theater doyenne who becomes romantically (but pragmatically) interested in White, while Charles Durning is the mayor whose lavish dinner with the film crew looks to be his career high point.

The chief pleasure here is the well-pitched banter among the characters, with dialogue that defines the bruised edges of various egos. Given that this is a Mamet screenplay, you can bet that a high-profile ethical dilemma will be the linchpin of the story, and so it is. All signposts point to the corner of State and Main streets, where a traffic accident will have an unforeseen impact on the crew and will eventually reveal the mettle of the film's real protagonist. In the meantime, lots of witty lines are deployed, machine-gun style, alongside the rat-a-tat-tat of repetition that has always characterized Mamet's dialogue. I still don't think that style lends itself so well to movies, although I can't deny that some of the actors here really make it sing, particularly Hoffman and Macy, and Parker is as natural in Mamet's hands as she's been anywhere since L.A. Story. (Pidgeon's performance is as mannered as the one she gave in The Spanish Prisoner, but doesn't seem as far out of character.) In marked contrast to other Mamet films, this one really is breezily entertaining. If the comic situations feel distinctly low-key and second-hand, their ironies are so delicious that you barely notice.

But -- and I seem to always have a but coming where Mamet is concerned -- as admirable as they generally are in terms of craft, this director's movies tend to be wrapped up so tightly that they lose circulation to the extremities. State and Main comes tantalizing close to recapturing the comic glories (amd moral compass) of Preston Sturges at his prime, but its high degree of stylization and god-looking-down-on-the-mortals sensibility makes it feel a bit like something that was photographed on the pre-fab set of The Truman Show. I laughed out loud (a lot) and I think I'd happily watch it again tonight, but I'd be grateful for a few moments that better resembled the world I live in.