The first important thing to make clear about Lars and the Real Girl is that it is roughly as much about life-sized love dolls as Signs was about aliens. Many might fear that a tale about a lonely man who introduces a female doll as his girlfriend could devolve into repellent or laughable pratfalls. But director Craig Gillespie and writer Nancy Oliver are too smart, and too sensitive to their protagonist, to vulgarize his story.

The second and more crucial thing to note is that the film's unassuming, resolutely innocent quality turns it into one of the most poignant portraits of loneliness I've ever seen. Rarely has a film so touchingly treated loneliness and diffidence not as clinical symptoms to be fixed, but as conditions that can be nursed and amended with unconditional love and acceptance. And the uncompromising way the movie presents this heartfelt insight within its unusual story is almost beyond description.

The film stars Ryan Gosling, in yet another brilliant performance, as Lars Lindstrom. He lives next door to his brother Gus (Paul Schneider) and sister-in-law Karin (Emily Mortimer). The problem for Gus and Karin is that Lars so stubbornly keeps to himself. He drives to work solemnly, quietly goes inside his house alone every night, attends church alone every Sunday, and barely associates with either Gus or Karin. He even refuses to come over for dinner, despite Karin's repeated pleadings, eventually giving in only when the pregnant Karin actually tackles him to the ground urging him to do so. And he consistently resists the advances of Margo (Kelli Garner), a co-worker who has taken a liking to him.

One day, however, Gus announces that he has a girlfriend he met on the Internet. But the girlfriend, Bianca, is really a life-sized love doll, much to the shock of Gus and Karin. No, she is not used for sex (because, as he explains, he is a devout Christian); she is really more of an imaginary companion for Lars.

Gus can't bear the fact that his brother may be completely insane. But Karin sees this strange new development as a stepping stone to the possibility of Lars's opening up, since he had never before so willingly communicated with them. The local doctor, Dagmar (Patricia Clarkson), agrees that accepting Bianca as if she were a real person might help Lars break out of his shell.

What elevates the story to the level of a Capra-esque fable is how the people of Lars's small town decide to go along with the plan to treat Bianca as a real person. They make subtle chuckles and snickers, which provide big laughs in the beginning. But when the townspeople band together to care for Lars - after one of the unanimously churchgoing townspeople rhetorically asks, "What would Jesus do?" - we know that the film's values are pure and it will avoid any easy shots at smuttiness.