Michael Pitt has managed to get typecast as the fresh-faced innocent, the baby-faced beautiful boy who exists to be shaped by the vision of others. The exuberant Pitt was putty in the hands of beautiful twins Theo and Isabelle in Bernardo Bertulluci's The Dreamers. He was remade into an androgynous rock star in John Cameron Mitchell's Hedwig and the Angry Inch. He mumbled and stumbled his way through Gus Van Sant's Last Days, portraying the suicidal rock star Kurt Cobain with uncanny pitch.

Pitt's forte is never in the mere delivery of lines, a skill at which he is more than competent. The actor's greatest gift is in reaction. It's all in his lovely, empty face, his big blue innocent eyes making new realizations, experiencing the possibilities of existence taking shape around him with a trademark mix of gratitude and joy.

Tom DiCillo knew just what he was doing casting Pitt in Delirious. Pitt's Toby Grace is a wide-eyed, homeless youth who befriends the shifty paparazzo Galantine (Steve Buscemi). Grace is ridiculously grateful for everything Galantine gives him: a closet to sleep in, a job without pay, a free meal at a fund raiser. Good luck, however, brings Grace into the path of the famous celebrity of his dreams, K'Harma Leeds (Alison Lohman, an angel in a push up bra). Before long, he finds himself on the other side of the red carpet.

The story is charming. DiCillo casts his lens on the exalted nature of celebrity and Elvis Costello makes a cameo appearance at a party. Though the film is funny and often astute, no new ground is broken. Bucesmi, in fact, stars in what could be considered a companion feature, his own film Interview, about a journalist's one night sparring session with a famous starlet. Delirious is the more successful film precisely because it does not take the subject so seriously. The film is a lark, a fairy tale, a tantalizing mix between John Scheslinger's much darker Midnight Cowboy and John Water's ultra sweet Pecker. Pitt and Lohman, together, are babes in a ridiculously tweaked wood. Their earnest stabs at happiness manage to be lovely.