Near the beginning of the climactic sequence of August Rush, there’s a shot of Manhattan’s Central Park. It’s taken from a distance, so we see mostly greenery. Occupying one portion of the screen, though, is the park’s bandstand, around which a large crowd has gathered for a concert. It’s a memorable impression of humanity separated from the wilderness by what links them: music.

Maybe it’s banal to think of music as an expression of the collective unconscious, a force within us that we do not so much create as vent. Or maybe it’s only banal when I put it that way, because this lovely, sentimental little fairy tale of a film captures that need to experience music in a way I could never put into words.

Like many fairy tales, August Rush is the story of an orphan, Evan, played by Freddie Highmore of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Finding Neverland. Raised in a series of rural group homes where he has never been able to fit in, he doesn’t believe his parents are dead. And he also believes in music: Though he plays no instrument and hasn’t studied it, he hears music everywhere in the world, music that lets him know he is connected.

So he escapes in order to search for his parents. We know his search has a basis: His father is Louis (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), singer and guitarist in an Irish band. His mother is Lyla (Keri Russell), a cello prodigy whose father has great ambitions for her career—too great to let them be ruined by a night of spontaneous passion in Washington Square Park with a scruffy Irish boy. Lyla’s father not only separates the two, he allows his daughter to believe that she miscarried during an auto accident, putting the child up for adoption instead.

Evan makes his way to New York City, where his musical genius finds soil in which to take root. He is both aided and exploited by Wizard, a street musician who Faginishly commands a troupe of homeless children to perform on street corners. (Wizard is played by Robin Williams, who for once tackles a dramatic part not by stifling the energy with which he usually invests his comic roles but by diverting it into anger and resentment.)

Even as Evan progresses, Lyla and Louis independently find themselves drawn back into the lives they thought they had put behind. Will this sundered family reunite? This isn’t the kind of story where that’s a serious question. (There are a few movies opening this week that shockingly refuse to end the way you expect they will: This is not one of them.)

August Rush is structured as a musical piece, with Mark Mancina’s score the skeleton on which it is built. The story is not shy about using magic, which the less charitable might refer to as implausibilities. I was willing to believe that Evan could get his hands on a guitar and learn to make music on it in his own way, less accepting of the speed with which he becomes fluent in standard musical notation. But such reservations are overcome by the velocity of the story, leaping over extraneous information as mother, father and child draw unknowingly closer together. And the ending of the movie was as emotional a moment I’ve had in a theater this year.

“I’m the kind of person who just sort of goes with that,” says director Kirsten Sheridan about the fairy tale aspects of August Rush. Speaking at a press conference for the film in Manhattan earlier this month, she recalled that the images that open the film were what first grabbed her attention in the script—a shot of a newborn baby’s hand, grasping as if in time to some unheard music, and then of the adolescent boy in a field of wheat, conducting the sounds of a wind-blown wheatfield into an approximation of the music in his head.

Feeling that what the script required was “some honest emotions underneath it to support the magic,” she was inspired by the work of Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and most recently Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, who in her view “takes what people think of as crazy and turns it all on its head.”

August Rush is the first American film from the young Irish filmmaker, the daughter of director Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father). But she says it wasn’t her idea to make the character of Louis in the film into a countryman.

“When I first read the script he was American,” she remembers, “so I had this James Dean idea in my head, and I was looking forward to it. But I was talking to [producer] Richard [Lewis], and he said, ‘I love your accent, can we make Louis Irish?’ And I said [sighs] ‘Okay.’ But the Van Morrison song [“Moondance,’ which first brings Louis and Lyla together] makes sense then because of that.”

It was also Lewis, advised by his friend David Crosby, who used the late guitarist Michael Hedges as an inspiration for Evan’s first musical expressions. They were drawn to his work, she says, because “he played the guitar the way a two-year-old would approach a guitar to make it his own, banging on it like a baby instead of picking it up and being all grown up about it.”

Along with the strong leading cast, Sheridan was able to attract some impressive talent for smaller roles. For the part of Richard, Evan’s case worker, she asked if the producers could get Terence Howard. “He’d just been in Crash and Hustle and Flow so I thought there was no way he was gonna take a small role like this. But he loved the music. On his first day he invited me into his trailer to play guitar for me. He can play it behind his back!”

For the ambiguously villainous part of Wizard, played by Robin Williams, the script required “a double-edged sword—the more Evan opens him up the more danger he opens as well. The first couple of takes Robin would be all high energy, and then we’d pull it back and make it quieter and softer. And then at the end we’d always do one take that was actually as written [laughs] which was always a bit of a relief! Sometimes we used his first take when we needed that energy and sometimes we used the quieter moments. So the fact that he was kind of like that anyway helped the character. I just felt Robin always has that kind of humanity in his eyes, which was great ’cause you’re never going to have a total just bad guy. He always seemed sympathetic to me.”

The movie’s real scene stealer, though, is 10-year-old Jamia Simone Nash, whose solo during a gospel number sent chills down my spine. “She did this incredible audition where everybody was saying what a cute kid she was, and then she stood up and sang and everyone went, ‘Whoooah!’ She’s cute but she has this voice that has 40 years of experience behind it. It was great fun with her because she’s so much energy that you’d actually have to physically hold her—I’d be in the shot crunched down holding onto her, whispering ‘Okay, now say the line!’”

Read an interview with August Rush stars Keri Russell and Jonathan Rhys Meyers at Artvoice.com.