It's like 'Harvey' with a sex doll instead of a rabbit

"Lars and the Real Girl" is a re-imagined "Harvey" with a sex doll in place of Jimmy Stewart's giant imaginary rabbit.

But it is not, as the premise might imply, some kind of modern, mocking, porn-culture put-down of Squaresville and its beloved icons.

It is, to the contrary, a movie that celebrates small towns and bedrock community values - one might even call it Capra-

esque, so long as we remember that "Harvey" was not a Stewart-Capra collaboration.

"Harvey" was based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Mary Coyle Chase, who created the Elwood P. Dowd character that Stewart made famous on screen. Her story pitted the lovable, delusional, frequently soused Elwood against his embarrassed sister, who wanted Elwood committed to save her public humiliation.

That same dynamic is repeated in "Lars and the Real Girl," which stars Ryan Gosling as a bachelor/loner whose debilitating shyness turns into full-blown illness as his brother and sister-in-law prepare to welcome their first child.

They know Lars has gone bonkers when he shows up for dinner one night with his new girlfriend - a "Brazilian" sex doll with pouty lips and anatomical cavities that a lonely fellow might explore.

That, however, is not Lars' particular need. For him, "Bianca" is a layer of insulation - the pretense is a way to cope with deep-rooted psychological impairment triggered by his sister-in-law's pregnancy.

A physician (Patricia Clarkson) recommends that friends and family humor Lars, and they do. It's particularly hard for his brother (shades of "Harvey"), for whom Lars has always been a source of shame, for reasons that turn out to be complicated.

The movie gets funnier and more poignant as the community warms to the fake girlfriend, and to Lars' "treatment" as a rallying point. A parallel story about the source of Lars' illness builds to a nice confessional scene of Schneider's character remembering contorted family history.

Scribe Nancy Oliver has said she wondered what might happen if communities embraced the mentally ill instead of stigmatizing and isolating them.

That's a bit of a dodge, since communities would be glad to embrace their mentally ill if they were as cute and harmless as Lars, and if their illness was obviously destined for short-term, tidy resolultion.

Still, there are some pretty nice moments here - it's good to see Gosling take a role that doesn't ask him to be a genius or a maniac, and that gives him a different look (with his added girth and mustache, he looks weirdly like Martin Mull).

And Schneider (also good in "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford") does solid work in a tricky supporting role. *

Produced by Sidney Kimmel, John Cameron and Sarah Aubrey, directed by Craig Gillespie, written by Nancy Oliver, music by David Torn, distributed by MGM.

Disclosure: Bruce Toll, an executive producer of "Lars and the Real Girl," is chairman of Philadelphia Media Holdings, owners of the Daily News.