The admonition "Different strokes for different folks" doesn’t necessarily apply to Secretary, a wry, witty, oddly gentle shaggy-dog story about sado-masochism. It’s hard to see how anyone could object to a love story that, however cheeky, proves downright wholesome in the, uh, end. This is an old-fashioned screwball comedy lampooning the new-age self-help culture. Not to mention a brilliant breakthrough for director Steven Shainberg and his star, Maggie Gyllenhaal.

She plays dumpy, doughy Lee Holloway, who’s just checked out of the clinic that’s been treating her for her habit of seeking relief through pain. Unfortunately, the ongoing dysfunction of her family is like that of Mike Nichols’s The Graduate in overdrive, and Lee’s quick resort to a concealed sewing kit of sharp-edged objects suggests she’s a long way from being cured.

But is a cure the way to go? Can indulgence in pathology be the means to self-realization? Those are the subversive questions Shainberg raises — but rather than focusing on the issues of a kinky subculture, his approach makes Secretary’s appeal universal. He evokes an almost dreamlike strangeness in detail and mood, a playful derangement that underscores the painfully familiar humanity of his protagonists.

In so doing he has fleshed out the Mary Gaitskill story on which the film is based — a feminist sketch couched in bland writing-workshop prose. His additions don’t help much at first: the mental hospital and the self-mutilation, the abusive alcoholic father (Stephen McHattie), the Barbie Doll sister (Amy Locane), and the damaged Stepford wife/mother (Lesley Ann Warren) are all clichŽs that push the film in the direction of an icky TV-movie with an Oprah-like agenda. But a few clues in the rough early going — a porcelain ballerina with a sharpened toe as Lee’s favorite cutting tool, and the unwashed flakiness of Peter (Jeremy Davies), Lee’s friend and wanna-be love interest — anticipate the raunchy and benignly perverse turns to come

Mostly, though, it’s Gyllenhaal’s protean and endearing performance that holds your attention. With her large, soft-seeming body and moon-shaped head, her kewpie-doll mouth, and those eyes wide with embarrassment and curiosity, she’s the anti–Parker Posey of independent film, the fleshy, flubbing alternative to the latter’s brittle cool. And when she finally makes contact with James Spader’s E. Edward Grey, Esquire, the film springs to life.

He’s the elegantly unhappy and entertainingly crabbed lawyer who gives Lee the title position, and as soon as she enters his lair, with its "Secretary Wanted" notice lit up like a motel-vacancy sign, the film enters into a new realm of weirdness. A masterpiece of production design, Grey’s office, with its corridors and dens of dense floral wallpaper, filigreed screens, sinister statuary, and predatory orchids, looks like a cross between a shut-down Chinese restaurant and the claustrophobic set of a David Lynch dream sequence. A suitable habitat for Grey, whose mandarin manners and dapper dress balance his hobbies of capturing mice and methodically humiliating his employees.

Miss Holloway and Mr. Grey hit it off. Not at first, though the light in Lee’s face after her first day indicates that she’s found a cause worthy of her devotion, and Grey’s compassionate (the Latin root means "to suffer with") bewilderment at her lack of affect ("A . . . wall," he concludes, sadly) suggests he might find in her opacity a mirror of his own lonely torment. And so they progress from typos circled by Grey’s blood-red pen to that first smack on the backside to the yoke and handcuffs of the film’s teasing opening scene.

Gyllenhaal and Spader bring tenderness and sting to their offbeat mating dance, which despite its unconventionality proves touching, hilarious, and erotic. Fragile, too, and in registering the pitfalls of a relationship based on inequality and an embrace of the inevitabilities of pain and solitude, Shainberg loses his way, dithering off into a fantasy sequence that is banal and confusing (the Astroturf on the bed is, however, a nice touch). And though Lee’s intermittent voiceover narrative may dispel mystery, it doesn’t add clarity.

So mark those flaws with Mr. Grey’s red pen, but don’t fault Secretary for advocating dominance and submission as a key to happiness. Rather than endorsing a particular lifestyle, the film dramatizes lives, and it touches on the needs, the suffering, and the conflicts we all share with a bracing and unblinking black humor. Secretary is no paean to pain but a rare cinematic pleasure.