In the past few weeks, I’ve reviewed four movies set in the 1960s. (One can see the autobiographical filmmakers’ distress: Starting January 1st, it’ll be accurate to say that the ’60s were a whopping 50 years in the past. Perhaps we’re experiencing a collective baby-boomer mid-century crisis.) The best of the lot is An Education, which is set in a London that was still tiptoeing out of the ’50s. Sidling soft-shoed into the future is Jenny (Carey Mulligan), a fresh-faced schoolgirl of 16, whose first step is projected to be an English degree at cozy Oxford. Her second, in all likelihood, would be in the direction of bourgeois drudgery—not that this twinkling teen fancies thinking so far ahead. Enter David (Peter Sarsgaard), an experienced man of the world, who challenges her notions—or does he?

Deftly made and engrossing, with a naturalistic sensitivity to its time and place, and a poetic affinity for its heroine, An Education is probably one of the most enjoyable pictures so far this year. But at a time when movies are so often sucking up to “influencers”—the self-described beautiful and damned of hipsterdom—this is a film that becomes pointy-edged square. It uses its vertices to stab at characters. And yet, the performers are so good, they dodge the blows. I don’t think one can blame the director, Lone Scherfig, or her crew; the movie has been so competently made—with a light touch that’s neither impersonal nor pretentious—that the production values almost transcend the flaws. But if the driver is blind, the make of the car hardly matters. The metaphorical motorist here, I can only assume, is Lynn Barber: the British journalist on whose memoirs Nick Hornby’s screenplay was based.

I have not read her book, which the script purportedly veers away from in some details, but from what I can tell, Barber never quite recovered from her break-up with the David figure. (Or, perhaps, Hornby wished she never did.) Speaking to a fellow interviewer, she was quoted to have said, “you should start like I do from a position of really disliking people, and then compel them to win you over.” This is about the opposite of how the movie treats David—that dastardly dissimulator! He finances his pseudo-aristocratic languor (as well as the Ravel concerts and Pre-Raphaelite auctions and excursions to Paris that he lavishes on callow teenie-bopper Jenny) with minor criminal enterprises such as blockbusting and finagling unsavvy packrats out of their pricey belongings; and there are other, shadier secrets he fails to divulge. He’s far from a blameless fellow, and quite unsuitable as a reliable spouse; but the film implies that he’s swindling Jenny, too. One look at Sarsgaard and you know better: David is a troubled soul, and his love for Jenny is more than a hoax.

Although Hornby’s dialogue is fresh and rhythmic, his little premonitory stammers issue out like notes sung too sharply. David’s associate Danny (Dominic Cooper), for instance, states early on that he “likes stuff”—ergo, his connoisseurship is no more than shallow materialism. As soon as Danny’s girlfriend Helen (Rosamund Pike) is introduced, she reveals herself to have the I.Q. of a lobotomized sea sponge; she can’t understand why Jenny would spruce up her speech with little bon mots en français, let alone recognize that Jenny’s “gibberish” is French. We see no other women among David’s bohemian set, so Helen sets the standard; the bar is so low that only a mouse could pass through. And since in the movie’s eyes David is also a mouse (or, to flummox my metaphor, a rat), Hornby sets little traps for his charming cosmopolite. At its lowest, the movie stoops to the oldest trick in the book: It insinuates that David is lackluster in bed. This sentiment is voiced by a girl who knows no alternative; you couldn’t get further below the belt without hitting the floor. David does nothing to make amends by the film’s close, which is true to his character, and probably Barber’s life. But when Jenny narrates at the end that she later visits France with a new boyfriend—presumably her own age—and notes that “it was as if I’d never been,” a little falsehood siren registers in one’s mind like a cuckoo clock. Who’s she kidding that David has been bowdlerized from her life? He’s the focus of her autobiography! Emotionally, the scenario tears him out of the picture like an erstwhile lover carved from a photo with scissors. No matter how sharp the scissors, however, Sarsgaard’s image is so strong that I could still see him beneath the outline—he’s more than negative space.

The actor—an American—slits his eyes superciliously to pass off as an English Jew. But this is no simple acting trick; David is acting, too—a Jew from the lower depths (though his background is not established) trying to pass off as an Englishman from the upper crust. He’s a confidence trickster, so his suavity is part of the act; but it can’t gloss over his flaccid cheeks—his stiff upper lip is surrounded by baby-fat. As Sarsgaard plays him, David connects to Jenny not as Humbert Humbert would a nymphet, but as a peer. In the most poetic scene, Jenny expresses that she wants to save herself until she turns 17. David asks to look at her breasts. She removes her bra, and he stares at them for a moment—gratified, but without savage passion or judgment—and then asks her to reclothe. It’s a beautiful scene—a distillation of his innocence. She wants to feel like an adult, but he’s looking for a high school girlfriend, someone to go steady with.

And one can see why he’d pick Mulligan’s Jenny. Mulligan—who’s 24—is a self-conscious actress, but subtle, cool, sensitive. She’s self-conscious without being an attention whore, and that seems perfectly in synch with this bookish budding existentialist, who listens to French chanteuses rather than rockabilly troubadours. (This isn’t American Graffiti, which was set in 1962—the year after An Education; it’s British watercolors.) The movie foregoes the cancerous cliché of having the ingenue’s first puff of a cigarette result in a coughing fit. Instead, we see Mulligan cradling her cancer stick, bringing it to her lips in carefully controlled motions. Like Sarsgaard, her features are soft; and is it just me, or does she begin to look like his auburn-haired little sister as the movie goes along? She goes from 16 to ageless. Jenny, perhaps because she is the author’s surrogate, hardly ever wallows in self-pity; but Mulligan doesn’t make our heroine gallant, and never milks us for sympathy.

Much of the cast is worth notice. As Jenny’s middle-class father, who trains his daughter like an academic racehorse before falling himself for David’s charm, Alfred Molina is a round square—emphatic at first, but improving as the movie goes on. Cooper is a tad obvious, and Pike is incredibly so—but in a gawky, likably dumb-blonde sort of way. Emily Watson is funny as Jenny’s pointy-headed headmistress, but both this role and that of Jenny’s teacher, Miss Stubbs (Olivia Williams), seem weakly contrived. To drive their point home with the force of a nail gun, the filmmakers have made Williams the victim of that old she’d-look-fine-if-she-let-down-her-hair-and-took-off-her-glasses jinx that was lampooned, one thought conclusively, in Not Another Teen Movie. Their point, of course, is that in 1961 Great Britain, women were either educated into social senility or became bohemian bimbos who lived loosely and yet had no more freedom than average housewives. The tension of this set-up comes in handy, and the gulf between the sexes was certainly more extreme at the time, but it feels a little dowdy—like the sort of viewpoint a gauche 17-year-old might have.

Despite its conventionality, however, An Education remains highly commendable—at least when it doesn’t try to be an education. According to Scherfig, “Right after the film ends, you know that the first Beatles album is going to come out.” Thankfully for us—or at least for me—I knew that merely as a matter of historical fact; the movie is unfettered by obvious portents. Through most of the film, Jenny seemed wonderfully unsymbolic of the decade that’s been milked and monetized by Taking Woodstock and Pirate Radio. The setting of An Education is within what many may now refer to as the Mad Men period; but, whereas the T.V. program shows an America on the make, contemporaneous accounts depict old Britain in decline. Watching Laurence Olivier in the 1960 film version of The Entertainer, we see an England that was bombed out by the Germans, but also a British Empire sinking under its own weight—not far off from how many Americans see their country now.

This double-edged nostalgia may partly account for the peculiar appeal of this transitional epoch from American Graffiti (1973) onward, but I think we’re especially in tune with its symbolism today. We may want to see ourselves like Jenny—world-weary yet innocent, proprietary but pliant. And, at the end of the movie, her troubles are assuaged. She pursues her studies, but doesn’t suffer the fate of Miss Stubbs because we unconsciously know that the world Jenny is embracing will soon open up around her. Even if one dislikes what the ’60s stands for, the possibility of renewal (or resurrection) still retains a value. And it’s to the movie’s credit that it piques the postwar era without denying it its richness. We see a flawed but sophisticated culture—at the apotheosis of modernist cultivation—and it’s in color rather than Leave it to Beaver monochrome. Just as Sarsgaard imagines his role too complexly for us to label David as a mere cur, the production design is too straightforward and sensuous to be a simplistic lament for lost innocence or naïve harbinger of better times to come. Jenny’s flippant voiceover can be taken to mean something the filmmakers may not have expected. It isn’t the petty Davids of the world, but the square, rigid attitudes espoused by Jenny at the end that made the Beatles happen.