The sooner you give yourself over to the dancing, the sooner you just sit back and watch, the sooner The Company will seduce you. There is immense pleasure and exhilaration to experience watching “The Company. Just let yourself go.

The Company is a lavish, affectionate valentine not just to ballet but to all performing arts. Though there is a quantity of tulle in The Company, the movie does not focus on the preparation and performance of classical ballets. We are happily well beyond the familiarity of The Nutcracker. The dances performed in The Company are modern ballets. They are more intimate, sexier and more colorful. They are the future of the art form.

If The Company still sounds like it might be less than compelling viewing because you’re just not a fan of dance, I would say, if you have any appreciation for the discipline and finesse of great athletes, you will be dazzled by the dancers’ strength and their dedication to refining their bodies to make them do things ordinary people cannot. The Company shows that dancers are great athletes. What they can do with their bodies is unequaled in the world of sports. The most fluid basketball player, the quickest baseball player, the show-off snow boarder, the most lissome gymnast - they do not marry physical control and expression the way these dancers do.

Though The Company sidesteps plot, there are compelling characters. At the center of the film is a young dancer named Ry, played by Neve Campbell. Campbell was a dancer before an injury forced her to change career paths and become an actress. The idea for The Company is her’s. She began working with screenwriter Barbara Turner, researching the lives and habits of the dancers. She joined the company of the Joffrey ballet and spent months training with them.

Campbell and Turner always wanted Altman as the director of their film, and he is the perfect choice for this film. He has made many films that do what The Company does. It drops us into the thick of the activities of a very specific world and mostly observes. This is true of his last film, Gosford Park, a look at the life of wealthy British gentry and their servants between the world wars, and films like Nashville (the country music scene) and The Player (the world of Hollywood studio deal making).

Altman resisted getting involved in this project. Only after Campbell and Turner showed him the hard work and the ugly side of the rehearsals that create the dance did he get excited and commit to making the movie. His ultimate enthusiasm for the subject infuses The Company with energy and joy.

Campbell deserves praise for her persistence in putting together the right team for this film and also for her performance. Her dancing, to my admittedly untrained eye, is wonderfully expressive. In this valentine to dance, her big dance - which is in the middle of the film, not the end - is with one male dancer to the song “My Funny Valentine.” It is a lovely, romantic performance, full of drama as the weather rages around the dancers at an outdoor performance. And though we know little about Ry, we hold our breath for her to triumph in this opportunity.

The other major character in The Company is the director of the company, Alberto Antonelli. The character is based on Gerald Arpino, a famously egotistical persona who wanted to play himself in the film. There are very few actors in The Company. The dancers are played by the company dancers, but Antonelli, Mr. A, as he is referred to by all behind his back, is played by Malcolm McDowell. He makes the stupendous professionalism and self-absorbed fanaticism a seamless mix of fakery and sincerity.

No plot in The Company, but things happen. To borrow from Paul Simon, there are incidents and accidents, hints and allegations. They are handled with an eerie matter of factness. This is life. This is what happens. Success and failure. And with each, you get up the next day and do it all over again.

In the course of the movie we see two ballets rehearsed and staged. The first is choreographed by Lar Lubovitch who works with two dancers for the dance to “My Funny Valentine.” His manner is quiet but firm. He sees that a dancer is working with a neck and shoulder injury and calmly says, I don’t like to work with injury. So Ry, who has been learning the dance as an understudy, steps into the role. No big fanfare, no “this is my big opportunity” hysterics.

We also see Robert Desrosiers plan and stage a dance called “Blue Snake.” We see Desrosiers meeting with the artistic team before rehearsals begin. He needs 20 dancers, doesn’t have the music yet (it is being composed), and he doesn’t have counts for the dancers yet. Mr. A warns him about “budget, budget, budget,” but really nobody flinches. They want the dance, so they will do what they have to do to get the dance, and in Mr. Desrosiers case that means a more stereotypical artistic termperment.

The Company focuses on Ry, and though we don’t spend lots of time with the many other dancers, even the little bits we get of them suggest stories as compelling as Ry’s. It is her story we see most, but we know she is just one story among many. James Franco (Spider-Man, and a Golden Globe winner for the TNT biopic of James Dean) is one of the few other actors in the film. He plays Ry’s new boyfriend Josh. He’s not important to what happens, but he looks great all the same.

Looking great is something The Company does throughout. Cinematographer Andrew Dunn, who also made Altman’s Gosford Park a visual knock-out, makes the film sing with movement and light. Even the grueling looks lovely. And that is The Company’s triumph: showing the dirty work of something beautiful and still preserving the appeal of that very transient and manufactured beauty.