Told in reverse, every romance ends happily.

So the hip, jaunty 500 Days of Summer, which pinballs back and forth through time, smartly opens with misery, grief and heartache and crests towards affection, infatuation and joy.

Smart, why?

Because by marrying Memento to standard-issue rom-com the filmmakers can strike a semi-cynical pose -- an omnipresent narrator is up front in professing this isn't "a love story" -- and shuffle the play-deck of predictable boy-meets-girl screenwriting, without depriving megaplex audiences of euphoric laughs.

The result?

A buoyant, whimsical charmer that glides by on wry laughs and movie-star magnetism.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as Tom, a Los Angeles copywriter for a greeting card company who studied -- and yearns -- to be an architect. (Architects in La-La Land? Believe it or not, director Marc Webb fashions a Hollywood in which not every building is a strip mall, beach adjunct or Beverly Hills mansion. Who knew?)

It's at his office -- which, with its pre-fab sentiment and designer emotions, acts as a serviceable reflection of the romantic comedy genre itself -- where he meets and falls maddeningly in love with Summer (Zooey Deschanel), his boss' new assistant.

Summer, however, is an enigma -- to both Tom and the audience, since we see her only from his wildly subjective perspective.

Is she sullen?

Cold?

Sensual?

Blunt?

Ethereal?

Or all of the above?

For hopeless romantic Tom -- who misread the ending of The Graduate and ingested far too much British pop music at an early age -- it doesn't really matter; he is in love.

How Summer -- who has from an early age refused to believe in love -- reciprocates those feelings forms the spine of the story and the basis for a mystery that's only answered during the film's denouement.

A movie as slight as this is ultimately only as engaging as its actors -- and both Gordon-Levitt and Deschanel are terrifically winning in roles that reverse the genre's gender norms. He's the one who longs for love and is confounded by her evasiveness, while she is the cynical object of affection who refuses to be won over.

Gordon-Levitt, a former sitcom star (Third Rock from the Sun) who's spent the past few years carrying hard-boiled indie thrillers like Brick and The Lookout, here takes a potential unsympathetic role -- whimpering and immature -- and makes Tom likeable, even at his most brittle.

Similarly, Deschanel manages to be both inscrutable but beguiling. As co-screenwriter Scott Neustadter -- who was inspired by his own experiences -- has said, everyone has either known a Summer or been a Summer at some point in their lives.

Along the way, Webb splices together animation with pop tunes with musical numbers --some of it works, some of it feels like a reach -- for one of the summer's most ambitious, refreshing sleeper surprises.

(This film is rated PG)

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