A young, socially dysfunctional man purchases a life-size doll over the internet, then introduces her to his family and townsfolk, who eventually play along as if the doll is ‘real’.

When I first heard about the plot for Lars and the Real Girl my response oscillated between enthusiasm and trepidation. While the description of the narrative appeared to signal a refreshing break from that of most Hollywood fare, I also envisioned the potential for disastrous mis-direction: another gross-out Rom-Com stuffed with innumerable sex gags, hokey one-dimensional small-town characters, and the kind of fluff ending that’s so forgettable they have to overlay the final credits with a gag-reel.

Had the Farrelly brothers (Stuck On You, Heartbreak Kid) helmed such a project that is precisely what the film ‘might have’ looked like. In the hands of director Craig Gillespie and writer Nancy Oliver (Six Feet Under), Lars and the Real Girl is something else altogether: a genuinely humorous and unassuming character piece on loss, love and delusion, that deftly avoids the ‘over-the-top’ histrionics to which it so easily could have succumbed.

It’s precisely this aspect of subtlety that really drives both the humour of the film’s light-hearted scenes – such as when Lars introduces the fishnet-stockinged “Bianca” for the first time, informing his dumbstruck brother and sister-in-law of her Brazillian-Danish heritage and her spiritual vocation as a missionary – and the emotion of its more serious moments.

As the narrative progresses, Lars and the Real Girl attempts to tease out the events from Lars’ past that may have contributed to his social isolation and his anxieties over physical contact. In doing so, the film commendably emphasises his character’s relationship to Bianca not as sexual or fetishistic but instead as therapeutic, as a psychological prop for his disguised childhood trauma.

In this regard, the success of Lars and the Real Girl rests heavily on the performance of Ryan Gosling in the title role, whose understated facial expressions and nuances belie a deeply conflicted and complex individual. It’s an ‘admission-worthy’ performance that only serves to reaffirm my opinion of Gosling as one of the finest character-actors of the contemporary scene.

But Gosling’s is not the only noteworthy presence in the film. Just as she did in the excellent The Station Agent, Patricia Clarkson performs her role as Lars’ GP-shrink, Dr. Dagmar, with a thoughtfully restrained and dignified demeanour.  The scenes between these two actors, in which the pair converse while Bianca receives her weekly medical ‘check ups’, are a highlight. There’s something highly engaging about the interplay that emerges as Dagmar attempts to draw out Lars’ feelings under the pretext of his ‘imagined’ relationship with Bianca.

Ultimately though, perhaps the film’s greatest achievement is in the way that it manages to build up an aura of reality around the rubberised figure of Bianca. Through her gradual imbrication within the social fabric of the town, Lars and the Real Girl persuades its audience to invest in her character – particularly in terms of her relationship with Lars. It’s a strategy that in the end carries with it some unexpectedly moving, and not simply sentimental, rewards.