Somewhere along the way romantic comedy became a kind of dumping ground for witless star vehicles: without charm, without comedy, and I daresay without romance. Certainly the screwball comedies of times past now seem mannered and preternaturally unlikely, but there remains a real pleasure in watching the suave Cary Grant type get dumped for the sincere Jimmy Stewart type.

Jump Tomorrow, the first feature-length film from Joel Hopkins, revives this lost sweetness to mostly excellent effect. It's the story of George (Tunde Adebimpe), who is slated to marry Sophie (Abiola Wendy Abrams), a childhood friend from Nigeria. George, befuddled and square--think Eddie Murphy's white-guy impersonation--meets Alicia (Natalia Verbeke), a lovely, gamine Hispanic girl hitchhiking to Canada with her boyfriend. Suddenly sense and nonsense switch places, and he finds himself racing through upstate New York in pursuit of something impossible yet irresistible.

George and Alicia are the dearest possible couple, clearly drawn to each other but unable to say or do anything meaningful about it. Strangely enough, they are quite nearly racial stereotypes--the buttoned-down American, the warm, lively Latina--but inhabited with such generosity that it hardly seems to matter. Then there's Gerard (Hippolyte Girardot), an emotional, CitroËn-driving Frenchman and expert on love, and Nathan (Maurice's James Wilby), Alicia's priggish Brit boyfriend, who meditates, pedantically derides French culture, and says of his impending marriage to Alicia, "It's going to be fascinating." Types they may be, but they stumble most realistically toward the ending, which merges happiness with the real awkwardness of ending up with the person you've been chasing for ever so long.

Jump Tomorrow has the color-saturated feel of a crazy '60s film like Blake Edwards' The Party (which Hopkins cites as an influence), senselessly mod and full of non sequiturs and physical comedy. Physical comedy is another great lost art, and there's nothing better than watching someone fall down on his way to falling in love.