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"Materialists" is not a rom-com, you may be happy to note. Oh, it's not entirely without rom -- in fact modern romance is its subject, although one about which it has earnest reservations. As for the com part of the ancient Hollywood formula, well, the picture is not without amusement, either, although its laughs are not telegraphed so far in advance that you're already dutifully chuckling by the time they arrive. No, this is not that sort of movie.

But while it is motored by the upwardly mobile strivings of attractive white people in the luxe, leafy version of downtown Manhattan, and by the activities of the well-fed winners in that urban dreamscape, the movie's characters are never predictable. Its writer-director, Celine Song, whose first film, the 2023 "Past Lives," won two Oscar nominations, has assembled an unimprovable cast -- Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal are the leads -- and she guides them through the inventive plot with great skill and sympathy.

Johnson is a professional matchmaker named Lucy, a star on the staff of a matchmaking company called Adore. The job has its fun side: Whenever a lovelorn client connects with a dream partner, champagne is immediately uncorked in the office. Basically, though, Lucy traffics in loneliness and disappointment. Calling to complain about a date she set him up on, one Adore customer berates her for failing to meet his age specifications for prospective girlfriends. "I was thinking 27," he tells her. "Even 29 is pushing it." Another client, a woman, is more seriously dissatisfied with the date Lucy set her up with: "He's the kind of guy who gets drunk and follows you into the bathroom."

Lucy's own love life leaves something to be desired as well -- "I'm gonna die alone," she muses, half-jokingly. She's still platonically connected to her ex-boyfriend, John (Evans), a struggling and therefore perpetually broke actor, with whom she used to share a dumpy apartment. Currently, she's more promisingly involved with a suave private-equity charmer named Harry (Pascal), whose own digs cost him $12 million to acquire -- a sum that clearly involved no financial strain. In matchmaking parlance, the handsome Harry is a "unicorn," a "10 out of 10" -- the perfect man.

The story keeps peeling back intimate layers of these people. Lucy, a character brought entirely to life by Johnson's solid self-possession as a performer, is confident enough to tell Harry, a classic good catch, "You can do better than me." And John, facing what he fears will always be an insurmountable handicap, tells Lucy, even after scoring a part in an off-Broadway play, "I still can't afford to be with you." (In real life, Evans already punched his Broadway ticket several years ago in the Kenneth Lonergan play "Lobby Hero.") Meanwhile, Harry suggests for Lucy the life-changing advantages that would attend her choosing a millionaire like him to settle down with. "Once you get your first $400 haircut," he tells her, "you can't go back to Supercuts, can you?"

Or can you

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To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

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