Robert Downey Jr, who turns in a
gleeful performance as Grady’s editor, Crabtree.

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.”

Frances McDormand as Sara with her husband’s blind dog who hates Grady.

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 (a warm, intelligent performance by McDormand): 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.”