Little Miss Sunshine is The Grapes of Wrath minus the wrath and I'm pretty certain all of the grapes. What it has is a lemon, a bright yellow Volkswagen hippie bus with a busted clutch, inching westward, ho along the Carefree Highway - an actual state road in the American Southwest that cuts through the kind of mythic vistas that get you daydreaming about the romance of wide-open spaces and two-lane blacktops, the American dream, rugged individualism, freedom.

You know, stuff like that.

There's even a box car, perfect for hopping. That would be the VW bus, again. It breaks down a lot, of course. In the film's funniest sight gag (and most pregnant metaphor for everyone chipping in and pushing toward some tenuous American ideal), a driver hunches behind the wheel as his passengers push. The engine turns over. Everyone scrambles inside - Pull Together or Bust.

But, boy, Carefree Highway - what a cruel, mocking name if you're a member of the Hoover family that has to drive it. The Hoovers are not as destitute as Steinbeck's Joad clan; headed out from ordinary, dilapidated Albuquerque for squeaky-clean, McMansioned shores of Redondo Beach, Calif., they're hardly on a dust-bowl pilgrimage. But the livelihood of the Hoovers is at stake. They are anxious. Some (Steve Carell) are suicidal. Others (Paul Dano) have taken a vow of silence or are chronic failures (Greg Kinnear). The oldest, Grandpa (Alan Arkin), keeps heroin in his fanny pack, which didn't endear him at the retirement home - he's been booted.

These are not carefree souls.

Except one.

Olive (apple-cheeked Abigail Breslin) is 7 years old, and not only is she the prize in this bittersweet martini, she's the heart of this buoyant dysfunctional-family-road-trip comedy in more ways than one. Without her, despite the family suffering darkly funny setback after setback, despite characters who beat their QUIRKY drum a bit insistently, there's a good chance that Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton's debut film would have enough helium to avoid being a downer; this thing practically begs to seem crankier than it is.

But with her, the movie's mix of two parts hope to two parts hurt balances out, and Little Miss Sunshine slowly becomes a plucky tribute to keeping faith and staying true to oneself. Like Olive, the movie stays optimistic beyond all reason. Olive is asked to compete in the Little Miss Sunshine kiddie beauty pageant - a turn of events that makes you wonder if the organizers had ever actually seen Olive. She has a pot belly, wears big eyeglasses. She's unaffected, kind of weird. She doesn't have a chance.

But the family members, who've run out of ideas and luck, become determined to prove she's a winner. Little Miss Sunshine has been dismissed by a few critics as just another eccentric-family comedy, not so far from Meet the Parents. The first time I saw it, I felt somewhat that way myself. Michael Arndt's script couldn't be called ambitious, and Faris and Dayton's direction often feels schematic - every wisecracking yin has their outraged yang, in an upscale sitcom way.

But seeing it a second time, I considered the irony that for a dysfunctional-family comedy to not irritate, the cast needs to be in sync, and this traveling troupe of dissonance effortlessly builds layers into one-note characters.

What unites them is their delusions. In the grand tradition of American satire, they're losers who keep on losing. Carell, who plays the nation's No. 1 Proust scholar, tried to kill himself after the nation's No. 2 Proust scholar ran off with his lover. Carell's melancholy performance is revelatory, Oscar-worthy stuff, as interior as Kinnear's can-do attitude is sunny - again, beyond all reason. He's trying to market a "Refuse to Lose" motivational program, and mostly losing at it. Which leaves Toni Collette, as Olive's frantic mother, to put dinner on the table, and dinner lately means buckets of chicken.

If I'm making this sound kind of grim, consider Little Miss Sunshine was an audience hit in January at the Sundance Film Festival; and Sundance audiences are like normal audiences in that they want to laugh. This received a standing ovation and laughs so loud I missed a few one-liners, and afterward Fox bought it for $10.5 million - the most ever spent on a single picture at the festival. It's a broad mainstream comedy being sold as art house wit, perhaps because a studio would have squeegeed the darkness. But as proof indie filmmakers will sell-out all on their own, thank you - well, I don't buy it.

Faris and Dayton, taking a stylistic U-turn from their music video background, have simply made a broad comedy about the kind of family that studios would rather avoid. The Hoovers are not upper middle class, and they are not hicks. They are lower middle-class Americans facing the possibility of sliding a notch if things don't improve soon. TV has always been much better with the middle class than the movies. But on a TV series, you'd probably not get this message:

It's all a sham.

That winner-take-all culture you bought into? That cult of ambition and upward mobility? What you win is a crass home dug into the natural beauty of the landscape, or a spot in a JonBenet Ramsey-ish freak show. There's something above-it-all about Little Miss Sunshine, but generosity is there where it counts. The Hoovers learn winners conform and losers show character. I don't buy it, but it's what the Hoovers (and audiences) want to hear. Then they can drive back to Albuquerque.

First Published August 18, 2006, 10:52 a.m.