American indie cinema loves fractious families, preferably in meltdown over Thanksgiving or Christmas, and road movies. Little Miss Sunshine combines the two genres as the cash-strapped Hoover family drive from New Mexico to California in a clapped-out VW van to take chubby, bespectacled seven-year-old Olive, the single ray of sunshine in this semi-dark household, to a pre-teen beauty contest. The trip is long, tempers are short and the van and everyone in it are on the verge of a complete breakdown.

Olive’s father (Greg Kinnear) is a third-rate motivational speaker, her mother is a frazzled working wife (Toni Collette), her grandfather (Alan Arkin) a heroin addict and her uncle (Steve Carell) a gay, suicidal Proust scholar. Even her brother (Paul Dano) is a Nietzsche-reading teenager who hasn’t spoken for a year. Dreams get shattered, egos are trampled and humiliations pile on top of utter defeats, yet everyone pushes bravely on in the wake of Olive’s dauntless optimism and kind-hearted hopefulness.

The schematic set-up perhaps inspired the primary-colour compositions of the American Southwest, reminiscent of a Road Runner cartoon. The beauty-pageant climax is pure hypocrisy as the movie mocks the freakish baby-whore contestants yet celebrates Olive for doing, in essence, just what they do. And the journey is familiar from films ranging from National Lampoon’s Vacation to the recent RV. Yet, contrived as it is, the movie has the edge (if not quite matching The Daytrippers, from 1996, arguably the genre champ) and is hugely enjoyable thanks to winning background detail, great throwaway lines and a superb ensemble (is it possible to fall in love with a whole cast?).

At the wheel, Kinnear steers evenly between irritating self-help speak and desperate dreams. Collette is strong and sympathetic as the frazzled wife, and Carell teases out the sadness hinted at in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. But the film’s heart is Abigail Breslin’s Olive. She’s funny with Dano, tender with Arkin (imagine his Yossarian from Catch-22 as a horny pensioner), and giddy or doubting when left alone. Olive is the hub that holds the family together, which acts in concert only on her behalf, and Breslin does the same for the film.

IAN JOHNS

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• DVD

• Oscars

• Bollywood

Editor's choice

• Desperados with avocados - a sort of Guy Ritchie film
• Live fast, die young: The 27 Club
• Madonna's 50 most memorable moments