THEY SORTA GOT RHYTHM

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Dancin' and singin' in the streets? Terrific. Just as it has been since Gene Kelly and friends pioneered the idea. A production number in a glamorous jewelry store--all sinuous chorus kids, wowing us with their giddy athleticism? Absolutely. It puts us in touch with the long-lost silliness of movie musicals. A romantic pas de deux on the banks of the Seine? Yes. And could we have seconds on that one?

It sounds like a nostalgic pastiche of great moments from the great MGM musicals of the 1940s and '50s, and it would probably be O.K. with Woody Allen if a lot of people out beyond his cult took to Everyone Says I Love You on just that simple level. But we've left out the song-and-dance routine he stages in a hospital corridor. And the novelty number in the funeral parlor. And the fact that the streets through which his people hoof and warble Tin Pan Alley chestnuts are not glamourized back-lot representations of New York City but the real, gritty thing. You can't see the dog poop, but you know it's there.

More important, his characters are not the usual musical-comedy creatures. They are your basic Woody Allen folks, a family of upper-middle-class Manhattan strivers--liberaloid, neurotic, mildly dysfunctional. Mom (Goldie Hawn) numbers among her causes prison reform. So, naturally, her eldest daughter (a wonderfully surprising Drew Barrymore as a coolly appraising material girl) falls for one of the recidivists (Tim Roth, in another of his beautifully calculated bounces off the wall) her mother brings home to dinner. This leaves nice Holden (Edward Norton) in the lurch and Father (Alan Alda) fuming impotently.

Circling around this central situation are a younger sister (Natalie Portman) mooning over a high school hunk; a younger brother rebelling by embracing neoconservatism; a senile grandfather; a Nazi-ish maid; an ex-husband (Allen himself) for Mom who keeps dragging his current romantic troubles into the picture; and Julia Roberts, curiously disarming as his latest psychologically bedraggled draggee.

Most of these people can't sing any better than you or I, but that's part of the movie's charm and a lot of its point. They all want their life to be set to a soaring score by Kern or Gershwin; they all want to believe that there is an authentic possibility of romance when they visit Paris or Venice; they all hope for the kind of transformative musical epiphanies that would suddenly be vouchsafed Kelly or Astaire as they soft-shoed through their happier--or anyway more stylized--realities.

But all they can manage is a wistful croak or an awkward shuffle. This is very funny, and it is often very poignant. For which of us has not dreamed these sweet little dreams of transcendence--sung a love song under our breath, done a silly little two-step on the way home from a musical when we guessed no one was looking?

In realizing his deliriously original idea, Allen occasionally stumbles. Some of his transitions are abrupt, some of his jokes predictable. And after nearly three decades, it may be time to revise or retire his screen character. He's too old to keep playing a perpetually muddled romantic victim. But he wears his ambition winningly and, as a filmmaker, achieves a transcendence of his own, making something fresh and beguiling out of that middle-class, middlebrow angst he has so often explored.