Rays of sunshine illuminate the bleakness

The family that pops Prozac together stays together, perhaps, but the family that piles into an old Volkswagen bus the color of a banana surely has more entertainment value. That at least seems true of the happily (for us) unhappy relations at the center of the bittersweet comedy of dysfunction Little Miss Sunshine, a tale about genuine faith and manufactured glory that unwinds in the American Southwest, but more rightly takes place at the terminus of the American dream, where families are one bad break away from bankruptcy.

Written by the newcomer Michael Arndt, and directed by the husband-and-wife team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, seasoned music-video directors making an effortless feature-film debut, Little Miss Sunshine relates the story of the Hoovers, just around the time that the youngish, harried Sheryl (Toni Collette) takes her suicidal brother, Frank (Steve Carell), under her wing. ("I'm glad you're here," she says. "That makes one of us," he answers.) Straight from the hospital, Frank moves in with Sheryl's family, including her seven-year-old daughter, Olive (Abigail Breslin); teenage son, Dwayne (Paul Dano); husband, Richard (Greg Kinnear); and father-in-law, a heroin-tooting crank simply called Grandpa (Alan Arkin).

The bandages on Frank's wrists are as fresh as his wounds when he enters the Hoovers' fold, a dim burrow filled with clutter and noise. Eccentric families are a mainstay of comedy, and at least in their schematized personalities (the sullen son, the desperate dad), the Hoovers are not much different from most, despite the vials of white powder tucked in Grandpa's fanny pack. They may be more downmarket than Wes Anderson's Tenenbaums and a lot scruffier than the average big-studio clan. (Their kitchen looks as if it hasn't been remodeled since Alice slaved for the Bradys.) But like most American comedy families, they are also a familiar social microcosm, a group of radically individualized souls in search of one another.

The means to that end is the competition of the film's title, a child beauty pageant called Little Miss Sunshine. Soon after Frank moves in, Olive, a dumpling of a child with oversize glasses and a seemingly endless reserve of optimism, receives unexpected word that she has been invited to compete in Little Miss Sunshine, just days away. Short of cash if not bright ideas, Richard decides to pile the fractious, reluctant brood into the family's antique VW bus so that Olive can live out her dream and prove herself a winner. Much like Steinbeck's Joads, the Beverly Hillbillies and millions of other westward-ho pioneers, the notably named Hoovers set a course for California, the land of sunshine, bleached teeth and eternal promise, leaving dusty Albuquerque behind.

Little Miss Sunshine doesn't look particularly ambitious, in terms of either its narrative or its function-over-form visual style. But tucked in between all the hurt and the jokes, the character development and the across-the-board terrific performances is a surprisingly sharp look at contemporary America, one that sets the metaphor of the stage (and, by extension, competition) against the cherished myth of the open road. Like her father, who's peddling a get-rich scheme, and like her brother, who yearns to fly the coop by becoming a jet pilot, Olive lives in a fantasy world that has become more real than her own life. When she watches a video of Miss America accepting her tiara, the image flickers in her eyeglasses, but it might as well be projected on her frontal lobe.