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Fox Searchlight is such a groovy little film company. It's so cool it's hard to believe it has anything at all to do with NewsCorp. As a division of 20th Century Fox – a major studio which has gotten a nasty little reputation of late for not only treating talent like crap, but for the questionable peopling of its marketing department – Searchlight has maintained a standard of taste, quality, ingenuity and foresight. This is the mini that in the last few years has brought audiences Sideways, Little Miss Sunshine, Juno and The Wrestler. They had the presence of mind to rescue Slumdog Millionaire from the straight-to-video scrap heap and the patience to shepherd it to the Academy Award for Best Picture. In a business where dumb movies featuring robots fighting each other routinely make 400-plus million dollars domestically and mall cops are the new heroes, it gets increasingly difficult to find small, thoughtful films about a boy meeting a girl at the multiplex. Searchlight brings that and more with (500) Days of Summer a modern take on the traditional romantic comedy starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zooey Deschanel and directed by Marc Webb.

The convention seems simple enough, but the story is told in an unconventional fashion. Gordon-Levitt plays Tom Hansen (every time his name was said I thought of the Atlanta Braves pitching staff and 21 Jump Street), an erstwhile architect wannabe settling for a job as a greeting card writer. New to the office is Summer (Deschanel), the boss's pretty assistant. He falls for her quickly and hard, and to his joy and surprise finds himself dating her. Told from Tom's point of view, the story unfolds in non-linear fashion. Utilizing this technique, the writers - Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber - tell the story of this relationship in the same manner as Tom looks back on it. Cutting back and forth interspersing Tom's days of elation with his days of abject depression, the storytelling curve never exactly ignores the beginning, middle and end of the story, it just never really feels compelled to unfurl in that order.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is absolutely fantastic in this role. He's compiling quite the resume lately with strong performances in The Lookout Stop-Loss and Brick. He provides Tom with such simplicity of truth and humanity, it's impossible to not root for him from the outset. Zooey Deschanel is fine, but she's not doing anything that I haven't seen her do more than a few times now. She's lovely, but she seems to be relying again on a cute, quirky affectedness that sometimes makes me thinks she's acting through a temporary flare up of Asperger's. And it's not always easy for her in this one. She's playing a character that can at times be infuriating. That said, I have a feeling that Deschanel is capable of further depth and I hope to see her go there soon. I did love watching Gordon-Levitt and Deschanel play off each other – they have a natural ease and chemistry about themselves together which made their on-screen relationship seem that much more believable. (They also worked together on Havoc.)

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