Everyone Says I Love You, Woody Allen's first stab at musical comedy, is an odd mix of old and new, realism and fantasy, craft and amateurism that shouldn't work but is inventive and hilarious anyway. The movie is about an extended family who exist partly in the real world of Manhattan's well-to-do Upper East Side but mostly in the realm of musical fantasyland. They're so rich that they host benefit concerts featuring Itzhak Perlman in their living room, ALT="[Everyone says]" width=164 height=225 hspace=15 vspace=5 align=right>

and they frequently travel to Venice and Paris (cities that Allen finds as enchanting as Manhattan). Bob (Alan Alda) and Steffi (Goldie Hawn) preside over a brood of kids and stepkids that includes Skylar (Drew Barrymore), Scott (Lukas Haas), and DJ (Natasha Lyonne). DJ, who narrates the film, is the daughter of Steffi and her ex-husband Joe (Allen), a novelist who is still friendly with Steffi and Bob.

As befits a musical, the subject is romance, in its many varieties and complications. An older teen, DJ falls easily in and out of love with a succession of cute guys. Her younger teenage sisters (Gaby Hoffman and Natalie Portman) have crushes on the same boy. Engaged to bland Holden (Edward Norton), Skylar finds herself drawn to Charles Ferry (Tim Roth), a bad-boy convict whose parole was secured by Steffi's activism. Joe clearly still pines for Steffi. In the movie's creepiest subplot, DJ fixes him up with Von (Julia Roberts), an unhappily married woman whose most intimate secrets DJ knows from having spied on her sessions with her psychiatrist.

Despite its complex plotting and some very mild political satire (Allen pokes fun at both Steffi's limousine liberalism, which blows up in her face with Charles Ferry, and Scott's equally vacuous, doctrinaire conservatism), the movie remains enjoyably light and fluffy, in the vein of Allen's earliest work. In fact, Everyone is so much like some of Allen's earlier films that it's easy to spot where Allen is cribbing from himself. (The whole movie seems to spring from the Greek chorus sequences of his previous film, Mighty Aphrodite.) The opening, with its magical Manhattan vibrating in tune to a Gershwin-era oldie, recalls Manhattan. The gag of unexpected participation from bystanders on the street comes from Annie Hall. Even the idea of eavesdropping on a woman's sessions with her shrink is borrowed from Another Woman.

Of course, the conventions Allen is renovating are even older. The family evoke those daffy, wealthy Manhattan families of such Depression-era screwball comedies as My Man Godfrey and Holiday. The songs, also from that period, tend to be obscure enough that the film's mostly untrained singers won't ruin anyone's memory of them. Viewers may cringe at Allen's whispery tenor or Roberts's low rasp, but the naturalism of having the actors sing in their own voices does solve the credibility problem that today's moviegoers have with musicals whenever characters suddenly break into song. Allen's daring and unlikely stagings of the musical numbers in commonplace locations -- on Madison Avenue, in a hospital corridor, in a taxi, in a mortuary -- help keep the film aloft like a balloon above the reality/fantasy dividing line.

The sentiments expressed in these old songs are timeless and universal, though the songs themselves remain stubbornly anachronistic, as do the youthful characters who sing them. (One of Allen's few concessions to the times -- and to today's multiracial New York -- is a rap group who do a brief but hilarious update of the film's recurring theme, the chestnut "I'm thru with Love.") The plaid-jacket/Hush-Puppies-wearing Holden, in particular, seems a middle-aged screenwriter's idea of what a young person is like. Still, Edward Norton's awkward preppiness does have a certain charm, and he has crack comic timing and a pleasant singing voice.

Other standouts include newcomer Lyonne, who makes the most of the Jennifer Tilly/Mira Sorvino comic ingenue slot, the perfectly cast Roth, and ringer Hawn, who really can sing and dance and shows a natural chemistry with Allen. Not all the actors are as convincing, either as comic performers or as singers, but so what? This is a silly, fun, frothy, buoyant, delightful brew. It's Allen Lite -- less filling, but tastes great.