It's easy enough to mock the conceit of The Jane Austen Book Club, which describes the coming together of five variously aged and addled So Cal gals – and one in-over-his-head young man – to parse Austen's novels and to note how their lives have taken on the characteristics of the author's plots. What's surprising, at least for those of us wilfully inured to pandering rom-com crap, is that the film (adapted from the successful novel by Karen Joy Fowler) pushes past tolerability into the territory of perfectly acceptable.

Long-time screenwriter and first-time director Robin Swicord isn't particularly inventive in terms of staging but, thankfully, her characters – including various boyfriends, ex-husbands and under-aged himbos – aren't types. They're mild live wires, and there's fun in watching them cross.

A proper cast inventory would take too long, but suffice it to say that the standouts are Emily Blunt (sleeker and meeker than she was in The Devil Wears Prada) as a brittle, sexually frustrated high school teacher, and Maria Bello as an overgrown cobbler's daughter who dotes on her friends while resolutely denying herself happiness. The film is stolen, however, by the previously starchy – and yet here totally charming – Hugh Dancy, who hits notes of high dorkiness as Bello's Ursula LeGuin-loving suitor.

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