"Marilyn Hotchkiss' Ballroom Dancing & Charm School" has a clunky title but an elegant concept: that the fantasy of the fresh start is attainable for all of us. It's as easy as one, two, cha-cha-cha.

Yes, this is another one of those movies about finding your own soul, and perhaps a soul mate, on the dance floor. But "Marilyn Hotchkiss" demonstrates that the same old construct can be made thrillingly fresh with the right components. In fact, this film does other power-of-dance movies one better by downplaying the dancing and underscoring what its brethren often lack: a compelling, wrenching and wonderfully inspiring story.

It's the story of misfits, and how the most unforgettable girl on the dance floor is the one with the black eye. It's also the story of people locked in their pasts: their first kisses, dead wives, dead dreams. Robert Carlyle plays Frank Keane, a baker on a delivery run who stumbles upon a horrific wreck.

The accident victim, Steve (John Goodman), has been nearly bifurcated by his car's crushed front end, but he's still lucid enough to implore the dumbstruck Frank to complete the mission he can't finish himself. Steve was on his way, he tells Frank, to an appointment he made 40 years ago. It's with a girl he fell in love with when he was 12 and they were forced into dance classes together. No matter what happened in the meantime, they promised each other, they would meet again at Marilyn Hotchkiss's dance school -- on the day of the wreck.

What follows is a deftly executed trick of weaving three different time spans together -- Frank's attempts to keep Steve talking as the paramedics work on him, Steve's flashbacks to an engagingly rendered 1960s childhood, and what happens to Frank when he goes to the dance school that night looking for Steve's lost love.

-- Sarah Kaufman

Contains mature themes and mild profanity.