Drew Barrymore and Hugh Grant in "Music and Lyrics"

Film noir is all well and good, but for me the genre that makes Turner Classic Movies indispensable is screwball comedy, those romantic farces of the 1930s and early 1940s about madcap heiresses, divorce and reverse class snobbery. Like noir, it’s a post hoc category created by critics to describe a range of movies, which means that there aren’t very many individual films you can point to as “pure” examples. (The paradigm usually offered is Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night, but I’d point to Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby.)

Also like noir, screwball seems so wedded to the era when it flourished that modern attempts to recreate it tend to fall flat. Or maybe it’s because it was such a star-driven genre, showcasing actresses like Carole Lombard, Myrna Loy and Claudette Colbert, who were possessed of an unselfconscious glamour that let them play silly without becoming silly.

Writer-director Marc Lawrence’s previous work—Miss Congeniality, Two Weeks Notice—has shown an affinity for screwball, but with Music and Lyrics he’s really pulled it off. That this works as well as it does is half due to casting: Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore may not be Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, but they’ll do in a pinch. And Lawrence gives them situations and dialogue that both exploit their particular charms and develop an engaging chemistry between them.

You don’t have to be a fan of old movies to enjoy Music and Lyrics—a memory of the 1980s will more than suffice. Grant plays Alex Fletcher, who is Andrew Ridgely in everything but name: the “other” guy in a 1980s Britband whose leading light went on to huge solo success. (The faux 1985 video by “Pop” that opens the movie alone is worth the price of admission.)

After a failed solo album of his own, Alex is reduced to theme park appearances and an offer to appear on a VH1 show, Battle of the 80s Has Beens. A shot at renewed glory comes when a Brittney Spears-ish teen star asks him to write a song for her guaranteed-megaplatinum new album. Catch is, he only has 72 hours.

Alex has no trouble concocting catchy melodies, but lyrics aren’t his strong suit. Enter Sophie Fisher (Barrymore), an urban gardener from whose subconscious words flow like water from her watering can. All Alex has to do is convince her that there is an audience for her gifts, which involves undoing some damage wrought to her self-confidence by her ex-teacher, a novelist who—

Well, it gets a little complicated from there, in a way that sounds preposterous to describe, though less so through the somewhat rose-colored lenses of the genre. Part of the appeal of screwball comedy is that it views everyone with amusement and no one with contempt. And it’s perfectly tailored to the strengths of its stars: Barrymnore is adorably but not implausibly ditzy, while Grant gets to toss off mostly self-deprecating quips in his usual understated way. (“My God, you’re Cole Porter in panties,” he says of his newfound partner’s writing abilities, adding “Of course, Cole Porter probably did wear panties…”) As a bonus, the parody songs are on a level with Neil Innes’ faux Beatles songs for The Rutles: How can you not want to hear a song called “Love Autopsy?”

If Music and Lyrics has a fault, it’s that it’s rather long for the fluff it essentially is. Still, only bad movies are ever too long, and this is one I would have been happy to see go on for another hour or so.