At a glance, Music and Lyrics doesn’t look so special. Warner Bros.’ anonymous marketing campaign for the film — routinely featuring Drew Barrymore and Hugh Grant sitting behind a piano with insipidly elegant decorations — seems to confirm suspicions that this is easily peddled fluff. Who would guess, then, that it contains the most convincing romantic chemistry in recent cinematic memory?

The movie is nothing if not unassuming, which is its charm: The tenderness and feeling reveal themselves through the care of the filmmakers and actors, who trace the contours of your basic meet-cute plot like the chords of a familiar pop song. Last week Diane Keaton flailed desperately for shrill, over-the-top laughs in Because I Said So. Music and Lyrics executes its romantic comedy with surprising subtlety and care, rejoicing in the simple pleasures of a well-played little ditty.

Drew Barrymore, as Sophie, encapsulates the laidback warmth radiated in the movie’s rhythmic display of heady adoration and subsequent heartache. Hired to be the plant caretaker for Hugh Grant’s washed-up ‘80s pop star, Alex, she fumbles at watering but finds work as his gifted lyricist and quickly falls in—almost stumbles into—love. Their mutual adoration comes together uneasily, and without the histrionics of clichéd love stories. Sophie doesn’t fall into Grant’s arms. In fact, at the first sign of flirting, she runs away clutching her astonished embarrassment.

Most positively, Music and Lyrics marks the intelligence and candid humility of Barrymore’s career-long knack for the comedy of real (and real-looking) people, from Riding in Cars with Boys to Fever Pitch. In spite of her strong will, Sophie’s awkward beauty hints at the disappointment she carries with her — including a messy breakup and artistic self-doubt — tempering her humor with emotional depth rarely afforded to studio projects released in February. When Sophie absent-mindedly floods Alex’s plants with too much water, the audience understands it’s because she has more troubling thoughts on her mind.

Music and Lyrics is a minor film, but its pop accomplishments are worthy of high praise. Here is a rom-com entirely free of chick-flick contrivance, pitched to the mainstream but not pandering. Sophie instructs Alex about his failed solo project, “You tried too hard for a hit.” The movie’s exhilarating appreciation of unpretentious pop music suggests a defense of its own guileless love story, which moves more slowly and naturally than your typical screamer of a rom-com.

In Alex and Sophie’s onscreen songwriting collaboration, we see the delicate make-up of great popular art. They work to find a groove that feels real, playfully slinking on the couch of Alex’s minimally furnished apartment, racking their brains for the right verse. They distract each other with clever banter and revelatory anecdotes about the past. At a creative roadblock, Sophie demands the couple take a walk outside and find inspiration in the everyday. Alex just wants to finish the last four lines. This is the back-and-forth of soul mates, the substance of great music and meaningful relationships.

Such a back-and-forth is also the substance of Music and Lyrics, an uncommonly humbling love story that demands the uncompromised truth about the way people really live and love. There’s nothing here out of the ordinary, and it doesn’t quite explode with the artistic zeal (not to mention the unsimulated sex) of John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus, released last year. Yet writer-director Marc Lawrence’s goal is just as legitimate: Here is a multiplex romance that validates the uplifting enlightenment of serious popular entertainment. It even convinces us of the sincerity of a cheesy song like Alex’s “Pop! Goes My Heart.” Music and Lyrics pops all right, even if isn’t likely to ever make a bang.