Unlike, say, the victims and perpetrators of Neil LaBute's Your Friends & Neighbors last year, these are not grotesques to be dismissed with cynical laughter. Neither are they the saccharine caricatures too often depicted in Ron Howard's recent EDtv. Anders's characters are people you wouldn't mind spending time with, and in some cases there might not be any choice -- the shock of self-recognition arrives regularly in Sugar Town. In its honesty, authenticity, exultant humor, and compassion, the film is an apt opening entry for the Boston International Festival of Women's Cinema, which has always celebrated reconciliation rather than rancor.

Relationships take a back seat to career for fading rock star Clive (former Duran Duran heartthrob John Taylor, making an endearing acting debut) -- or would if his car weren't already packed with the aging rockers resembling extras from Spinal Tap that he's thrown together for his hoped-for comeback band. They're en route to find out whether their manager has gotten funding for a new CD of their godawful rap "fusion" music, and the news isn't good. Things aren't much better back home, where Clive's wife, Eva (Rosanna Arquette, matured but still fiery), has just been offered a role playing Christina Ricci's mother. Neither do they improve when a new-agey woman comes to their door to deliver her son "Nerve," a pre-adolescent wildcat with cadmium-yellow eye make-up whom she claims Clive fathered back in the good old days.

Meanwhile, up-and-coming songstress Gwen (Meg Ryan look-alike Jade Gordon) is showing how dreams come true '90s style. When she's not terrorizing her junkie songwriter into finishing a Fiona Apple-type tune about a girl in a mental hospital, she's playing All About Eve with neurotic Hollywood production designer Liz (Ally Sheedy, as comically sharp as she was dramatically deep in High Art), blithely sabotaging Liz's life and picking up the pieces for her own use. Amid that detritus is Clive's manager, with whom Gwen negotiates a deal that would put Monica Lewinsky to shame. Others in Sugar Town have more respect for family values, notably John Doe (he seems the least comfortable and convincing in the cast) as a studio musician who's reluctantly opted for a tour with a salacious Chicana pop star (an unfortunate lapse into stereotype) interested in more than his guitar chops. He needs to support a household of hungry mouths, including a bunch of pigs, a passel of kids (Doe's own, and they're great), a wife (Lucinda Jenny, nurturing but randy), and a recovering addict brother with designs on his sister-in-law.

Sordid, yes, but not beyond redemption -- with the possible exception of Gwen, who's young and will learn. With 30 significant characters (all memorable, especially Beverly D'Angelo in a brief turn as a potential wealthy backer, a brassy broad who doesn't mind admitting that she got where she is on her back), the interlinking plot lines, and the pop-music background, comparisons to Robert Altman's Nashville are inevitable. Anders, though, has none of Altman's bite, artistry, or bile, which means her characters have a chance at a happy ending. Not that she doesn't pay due attention to the odds against them -- the drugs, greed, heartlessness, infidelity, deceit, malice, and bad taste that some filmmakers celebrate with hip cynicism and voyeurism, others with cheap melodrama and moralism. But Anders looks on with knowing tolerance, a non-condescending clarity that implies a better way. There's irony and perhaps a little shock value intended when it's said about one of Clive's colleagues, "You know what he thinks about having sex with adults," or when John Doe announces he's off to rehab as if it were one more errand to run, like going to the grocery store. But when these benighted heroes and heroines actually do turn their lives around, sort of, it's for real -- not just a sugar coating.