Finally, A

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE FABULOUS BAKER BOYS Directed and Written by Steve Kloves

In small-time show biz, fading but persistent optimism is always engaged in a losing struggle with slowly metastasizing despair. Since Jack and Frank Baker (Jeff and Beau Bridges) are approaching middle age and still playing duo cocktail piano in Seattle's lesser lounges, an air of hopelessness has begun to hang heavy. Stardom is no longer an option; survival, even on the bottom rung, is becoming a question.

The Baker boys need to refurbish their tired act. But Susie Diamond (Michelle Pfeiffer) is not at first glance an answered prayer. She totters into their lives on a broken high heel, late for her audition and not exactly thrilled to be there in any case. But wonder of wonders, she can sing. And both onstage and off, she combines worldliness and vulnerability in a way that shakes up audiences as well as her new employers.

Can a partnership based on the habit of failure deal with the potential for success she offers? That question preoccupies first-time director Steve Kloves' realistic-romantic, wry-funny, altogether delightful movie. And it is not easily solved.

Banality is a security blanket for Frank. He has been playing the standards in a routine fashion for years, stitching the songs together with chipper- inane prattle as featureless as his musicianship. He's just a guy supporting his offscreen wife, kids and mortgage in a way he finds more congenial than, say, selling aluminum siding. Banality is a hair shirt for Jack. His life is all squalid improvisation and silent disgust at tinkling out "piano stylings." He knows better, and he might do better, as a jazzman.

By transforming their act, Susie of course changes the brothers' lives. To deal with her, they finally have to confront themselves and a relationship based far more on shared genes than on common ideals. The wary way in which she and Jack circle in on a relationship is one of the truest representations of modern romance that the modern screen has offered. The gradual stripping away of false issues between the brothers (Why is Jack always late for gigs? Why does Frank fuss so much about his bald spot?) as they get down to the true ones (involving, naturally, their childhood and piano lessons) is done with similar subtlety. Kloves' delicacy as a writer is, moreover, matched by his restraint as a director. It would have been easy to patronize or satirize the less than fabulous milieu of The Fabulous Baker Boys. Instead he and his fine cinematographer, Michael Ballhaus, have created a gently dislocating noirish mood -- not quite menacing but not exactly comfortable either -- and let it speak for itself.

It is a setting where actors can live and breathe like real people, and the Bridges boys are better than fabulous in it -- Jeff not quite falling over the line into unredeemable cynicism, Beau never succumbing to the pull of moral blandness. Pfeiffer, who does her own singing, is a cat with at least nine dimensions ever aflicker in her eyes.

What emerges here is a Hollywood rarity these days, a true character comedy. ; Because it is a form the studios no longer trust commercially, Kloves lingered four years on the street of broken deals before getting his script onscreen. His persistence deserves a reward. And as a near perfect example of an endangered species, The Fabulous Baker Boys deserves the protection only large, enthusiastic audiences can provide.