Kissing Jessica Stein Starring and written by Jennifer Westfeldt and Heather Juergensen. Directed by Charles Herman-Wurmfeld. Rated R.

Zingy one-liners. Jazz standards on the soundtrack. A cozy Manhattan milieu. If Woody Allen were 35 years younger, more attractive, and a lesbian, he might've made something like Kissing Jessica Stein. (That's a fairly ridiculous statement. If Woody Allen were all those things, he'd be a completely different person. But would he still be living with Soon-Yi? Hmmm...)

The movie's title character (Jennifer Westfeldt) catches a personal ad in The Village Voice one day that quotes her favorite Rilke poem. Jessica is straight, and the ad's under the heading of "Women Seeking Women," but she answers it anyway and meets Helen Cooper (Heather Juergensen), a shiksa who's an assistant director at an art gallery. They become fast friends, but their romance develops much more slowly. Both women are inexperienced with other women, which inspires some funny gags -- when Jessica finally gets comfortable kissing Helen, she celebrates by high-fiving her -- and also allows the movie to sidestep some of the clichés of gay romance.

It doesn't avoid all the clichés, though. The film indulges in that old romantic comedy staple, the parade of bad dates. The treatment of the two guys who try to pick up Helen and Jessica is vaguely prejudicial -- working-class straight guys aren't the only ones obsessed with lesbian sex. The scene where Jessica's doting mom (Tovah Feldshuh) comes to terms with her daughter's sexuality is well-written and terrifically played, but it's still a chestnut of gay drama: the forbidding parent figure who turns out to be understanding and/or knew all along. (The scene from Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet remains unmatched.)

It's the Jewish flavor of the humor that really registers. The film's first sequence shows Jessica at temple, taking part in the service while her mother and grandmother try to set her up with eligible men until she bursts out, "Will you two shut up? I'm atoning!" When Helen asks what Jessica's therapist thinks of their affair, Jessica responds in all shock, "I could never tell my therapist. It's private." The subject of being both gay and Jewish is never engaged, but given the tendency of Manhattan-set tv sitcoms to shy away from explicit Judaism, the film comes off as refreshingly forthright about its religious background.

Comedies about neurotic single people sorely need actors with charm, and Westfeldt has it in spades. Her voice is an extraordinary comic effect in itself, whooshing up to high notes, running off on high-speed conversational tangents, and getting laughs by trailing off at the end of sentences. The rapport between her and Juergensen is effortless, as it should be after the two lead actresses created the Off-Broadway play that formed the movie's basis. Jessica may be derivative of Rachel on Friends, but Westfeldt clearly knows the character's psychic territory and invests her with an uncanny sense of presence.

The film's conclusion is its most serious flaw, giving us a traditional happy ending and then undoing it in favor of the Annie Hall resolution -- the false climax feels more apt than the real one. Even that, though, can't mar this cleverly scripted and enormously likable comedy. Kissing Jessica Stein is a useful reminder that on some level, we're all Jewish American princesses.