Watching Lars and the Real Girl is like watching a high-wire act. Any wrong move could lead to complete disaster. One wrong line, one over-acted scene, one tip too far into the direction of farce would be enough to send the whole thing crashing down. In a lesser film, Lars’ brother would simply remain hostile until the end. Or the townsfolk would be brightly-colored caricatures. The ending would be pure schmaltz. Lars himself would be laughable, or merely pathetic. Unbelievably, none of these things happen. No false note is struck. It’s a bit of a miracle.

See if you can pick out all the ways this could have gone wrong. Lars (Ryan Gosling) is a quiet working stiff living in the garage of his brother Gus (Paul Schneider) and sister-in-law Karin’s (Emily Mortimer) home. Lars avoids Karin’s every attempt to bring him into life in the house. Gus is indifferent, in that way brothers who don’t want to rock the boat are. Lars doesn’t talk to anyone at work, least of all the cute girl, Margo (Kelli Garner). Somewhere and somehow (critically, we are not shown the decision-making process) Lars decides to order a Real Girl, kind of the Rolls Royce of sex dolls. (This is the part of the review where all critics are required, by law, to mention the Uncanny Valley Effect.)

The fateful day of arrival comes. Lars, excitedly, comes to Gus and Karin’s door to tell him about this new girl he met on the internet. No problem. She doesn’t speak a lot of English, says Lars. Okay, say Gus and Karin. Also, she’s in a wheelchair. And since we’re both quite religious, can she stay in the house? Sure, we’ll accommodate, say Gus and Karin. They’re just happy Lars is talking to someone. Cut to Gus and Karin, sitting side by side, staring in silence. You can almost feel Lars vibrating with happiness, like a puppy with a gift for its owner, just off-camera.

And then, cut again…

Soon after, a loving Karin and shell shocked Gus take Lars and “Bianca” to Dr. Dagmar (Patricia Clarkson, one of our national treasures) to get “her,” and surreptitiously Lars, checked out. Lars isn’t necessarily crazy, Dagmar explains, nor is he a pervert. He’s simply a very lonely man working through some problems, and the delusion of Bianca is helping him cope. Gus is mortified at the prospect of Lars’ embarrassment, but Karin is game to do whatever’s necessary to help Lars. And Lars has never seemed so alive.

Soon enough the whole town knows, from the deacons of Lars’ church to his coworkers. How could they not? He takes Bianca everywhere, because why not? They’re a starry-eyed new couple, and Lars wants to show Bianca everything and everyone in his admittedly limited life. The potential for harassment and complete ostracism is immense. And yet the people who populate Lars’ life don’t react as you think they would. By that, I do not mean they suddenly band together and cheer him on. I mean they really do act unexpectedly, as dictated by their natures. This film allows them to grow.

Lars and the Real Girl is wise about the ways we externalize what troubles us to cope with them better. There is not a person alive who doesn’t project human thoughts and feelings onto the fundamentally inhuman – just ask any pet owner or car lover. Lars doesn’t offer any pat answers on why we do this, it simply recognizes that we do, and builds a case on why even the most eccentric manifestations of this tendency are more normal than we may be comfortable admitting.

Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman calls Lars and the Real Girl “heartwarming,” complete with quotation marks, and makes a disparaging reference to Gosling’s “mugging.” I couldn’t disagree more. There’s an understated quality to almost everything in Lars, where what would be a needlessly expository line of dialogue is replaced by a simple look, or gesture, or distant reaction shot. Director Craig Gillespie and writer Nancy Oliver (whose “Six Feet Under"-honed chops manifest clearly) trust their story, and perhaps more importantly, they trust the actors they’ve entrusted to deliver it. Saying Gosling inhabits Lars perfectly seems almost superfluous, or perhaps even inaccurate; there’s just Lars up there, not an actor reading his lines. The same can be said for Clarkson, Garner, Mortimer, Schneider, and every single smaller part right down to the deacons. This is a film of uncommon humanity, and one of the best of the year.