Michael Douglas in a coming-of-age movie? Well, yes. But, says Nick Roddick, it's Michael Douglas like you've never seen him. And, as a result, Wonder Boys is warm, funny and surprisingly moving.

There was a famous moment at the Cannes film Festival in 1989 when director Steven Soderbergh stepped up to receive the Palme d'Or for Sex, Lies & Videotape. It was, he noted wryly, his first film "and I guess it's all downhill from here!" Michael Douglas knows just how he felt: he was only 30 when he picked up his first Oscar, as producer of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, in 1975. "I remember thinking, 'Well, this is it - this is the highlight of my life,"' he recalls. "'It can't get any better than this.'" It did, of course, as Douglas is the first to admit. After another notable foray into producing with The China Syndrome, he resumed his acting career in the late seventies. And, by 1985, he'd bagged a second Oscar, this time as Best Actor for his portrayal of Gordon Gekko in Wall Street.

The character Douglas plays in Wonder Boys should be so lucky. Seven years ago, Grady Tripp wrote a prize-winning novel and was lionised by the literary world. Now, pushing 50 and teaching a Creative Writing class at a University in a drab Rust Belt industrial city (the production used Pittsburgh's Carnegie-Mellon University as a location), Grady's life is in chaos. Not so much because of as in spite of this - Grady, after all, seems to thrive on chaos - his second novel shows no sign of getting finished. It's not that he has writer's block. In fact, he could scarcely be less blocked: the real problem is, Grady just can't stop. Already filling several boxes in his cluttered study, the new novel has reached page 2661 as its author thrashes around in search of an ending. Which is when James Leer backs into his life.

James - played by Tobey Maguire - is the best writer in Grady's class, regularly chuming out gloomy short stories with a numbing line in Catholic guilt. Too odd to be popular with his fellow students, James cultivates an air of mystery. But he reluctantly reveals details of his life - most of which turn out to be fabrications - to Grady when they meet in the snow outside a faculty reception. Like Martha in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, James lies a lot "because it helps (him) control the world". For Grady, however, controlling James is a whole different ballgame. Before long, the precarious balance with which he has juggled his life - the wife who left him that morning; his ongoing affair with the University Chancellor, Sara Gaskell (Frances McDormand), who also happens to be married to his head of department, Walter (Richard Thomas); the joints he smokes continuously (and the falling-down fits they seem to bring on); the prying of his editor (played with malicious glee by Robert Downey Jr.) who is in town for the college's annual 'Wordfest' and needs to get hold of Grady's new novel before his own career goes down the tubes - results in all these balls kept somehow in the air starting to come tumbling down.

Within hours of encountering James in the snow, Grady has a dead dog in the trunk of his car. He also seems to have acquired Walter's other prize possession - a jacket worn by Marilyn Monroe on the day she married Joe DiMaggio - which James had stuffed into his canvas bag and then left in a lecture hall. And last but not least, a large man with a passing resemblance to James Brown keeps trying to steal his car, claiming it is not Grady's but his. Stumbling through the weekend part-stoned and largely sleepless, in a pink woman's dressing gown and with two holes in his leg inflicted by Walter's dog before James shot it with what, moments before, he had claimed was only a cap pistol, Grady allows Douglas to reveals a whole new side to his personality - and a whole new register of talents as an actor.

"Wonder Boys is kind of a tragicomedy," he says. "It's funny and poignant. And Grady is certainly more fun and vulnerable than characters I've played in my last couple of movies. If you've had some success in your career, it's part of your responsibility, I think, to push yourself. This role is rewarding for me and, hopefully, a surprise for audiences."

"With Michael," adds Wonder Boys director Curtis Hanson, "as with anybody you've seen over the years and think you know, there's a whole other side to him when you get to know him personally. I wanted to explore that vulnerable side - and also the funnier side."

Hanson, too, knows what it is to be a 'wonder boy' (someone who peaked early, then faded). Except that his 'boyhood' came around the time he turned 50. That's when, after years of patiently making the films handed to him, he shot to critical and public prominence with L.A. Confidential. That, he admits, was a hard act to follow. But Wonder Boys more than rises to the challenge. Perhaps more to the point, it is every bit as hard to classify as Hanson's 1997 Oscar-winner. But there are definite similarities. "It struck me halfway through shooting," he told the Los Angeles Times in February, "that Wonder Boys appears to be very different from L.A. Confidential. But in one way it is very similar: it's a picture about a small group of characters, each of whom is trying to figure out how to live their lives and to make choices. The difference is that these characters are funny."

Also, he might have added, strangely but compellingly innocent. Because, whereas Grady - like the character Douglas played in the 1993 hit movie - keeps falling down, there always seems to be someone to catch him, someone to help him. And, for all their hidden agendas, deceptions, self-deceptions and occasional moments of violence, the main characters are all good-natured innocents trying to make the best of the hand that has been dealt to them. Wonder Boys is, in the final analysis, a hymn to the human condition, with all its flaws and foibles. Nowhere is this clearer than in Grady's response to Hannah, the beautiful young female student - played by Dawson's Creek's Katie Holmes - who has taken a room in his house and repeatedly hints that she might like their relationship to become even closer. "I'm not as innocent as you think," she tells Grady coyly at one stage. "Too bad," he replies. "The world needs all the innocence it can get."

But the core relationship in Wonder Boys is not between Grady and Hannah, not even between him and Sara: it is the almost paternal relationship he slowly establishes with James Leer. I say 'almost' because, although Wonder Boys is in many ways a coming-of-age movie, the ones who come of age over the weekend are both the 20-year-old and the 50-year-old, as they discover truths about themselves in the process of coping with an almost farcical escalation of events. The movie is punctuated with scenes in Grady's decrepit car, in which the two drive from one improbable encounter to another, getting to know each other in the process. And, not long after his morose debut - where, after Grady has read his latest literary guilt-trip to the class, James' only comment is to ask him to turn out the lights and leave him in the dark when class is dismissed - the boy begins to thaw. "I don't think he has social skills," says Maguire of James' starting point. "He doesn't know how to relate. He's guarded and keeps his distance from kids his own age. But, even with his guard up, James has a great sparkle underneath and is thrilled to be hanging around with these two older guys, Grady and Crabtree."

In fact, many of the memorable moments in Wonder Boys come when James' glum face cracks into a lop-sided smile. "The flashes are the key," Hanson, who reportedly picked Maguire from over 100 hopefuls, told Entertainment Weekly recently. "Because it's the flashes in which Tobey lets us into James Leer."

And Grady? Grady is a little bit more of an open book, because his failures and vulnerabilities are easier to relate to. "The film has a real poignancy," says Robert Downey Jr, who makes an unforgettable entry, accompanied by a towering transvestite called Antonia Sloviak (Michael Cavadias), who also turns out to be remarkably sweet-natured. "You can experience that 'wonder boys' phenomenon regardless of what generation you're in. It reminds me of people in the eighties who were living high off the hog in New York and L.A. They were at all the clubs and had all the new clothes and so on. Now, 10 years later, they're still wearing the same stuff and still trying to ride on the same coat-tails, except that it's just not working any more. They really haven't done anything for 10 years. I think that's where Grady and Crabtree are at. They're both in crisis."

And the wonder of Wonder Boys is that they both, in very different ways, resolve their crises, as does almost everyone else in the film. "Michael, Robert, Tobey - they're all wonder boys at different phases," says Hanson, referring to the characters rather than the actors. "The other thing about them, including Frances' character, is that they are all yearning for love, family, human connection. And they're all conflicted about it or afraid of it. "If you dissect their actions, they are not politically correct. But there is such an attitude of acceptance about them towards the human condition, that it gives the whole thing a warmth and makes you care. And that's what makes it funny."