Lone Scherfig’s “An Education” follows a young English girl, Jenny, as she takes a detour from a stodgy career path into the swinging world of sixties London. Based on a memoir by Lynn Barber, and adapted by Nick Hornby, Scherfig mines the usual antagonism between school and life: will Jenny choose “the real world” outside of academia, or glumly trudge toward the career prescribed by her father? The question is insulting for two reasons. One, the opposition between real life and the university is a false one at the undergraduate level. It is ludicrous to think the experiences Jenny has would be closed to her in college. Second, and more starkly, an audience’s sympathies for a girl moaning about having to attend Oxford are bound to be a bit strained. Nobody can seriously imagine for a moment that an Oxford graduate’s options in life are narrowed. They’re enhanced a hundredfold, and strangely Scherfig expects us to forget this. “A Taste of Honey” it isn’t.

Thus, as a memoir, “An Education” reads like a fatuous tale of a girl ridding herself of the guilt over her class privileges. Her career is never seriously threatened; even when Jenny is tossed out of school, the film barely wastes a moment wringing its hands about the possibility that Jenny will wind up a broken-backed NHS clerk. Time passes quickly in a montage sequence and before we know it—ta da!—Jenny is exactly where she set out to go. The final scene shows us Jenny at Oxford, riding a bicycle toward the Bodleian with a boy at her side (“and they were boys”, she says), telling us he wants to take her to Paris. “I said I’d always wanted to see Paris. As if I’d never been!” Yes, as if she’d never been. As if no undergraduate had ever before entertained the bizarre notion that one could attend Oxford and visit Paris. The bloom of youth is back upon Jenny’s cheeks; life is once again a colorful efflorescence of experiences waiting to be plucked; and we are left scratching our heads wondering why the filmmakers ever expected us to believe it would be otherwise.

But unlike a written account, “An Education” is a film and hence only seldom functions as a memoir, as such. Only during the brief, infrequent voiceovers are we distanced from Jenny’s adolescent experiences by her adult self. More generally, tied to the restricted point of view of a confused teenager, “An Education” is actually fresh and funny, made wonderfully lyrical by Jenny’s bittersweet longing to be grown up already. This is accomplished by Hornby’s script, which is tight and tonally perfect in its smaller dramatic moments, if not its larger structure, and more impressively in the person of the winsome actress who plays Jenny, Carey Mulligan. She brings exactly the right amount of intelligence, curiosity, imagination, and naiveté to each scene, and manages not simply to embody these characteristics as static qualities but to juggle them gracefully. Mulligan’s adorable, searching face is mesmerizing as she registers the new experiences her friends offer her. Whether at a fancy concert, a posh dinner, or a weekend getaway, Mulligan allows us to experience this wondrous new world through Jenny’s enchanted senses, “as if we’d never been”.

Peter Sarsgaard manages a good English accent as David, the jumped-up pantry boy scheming his way up the social ladder. He’s a likable con man capable of many roles, whether brashly courting Jenny on a rainy day, charmingly courting her parents, or behaving with tender restraint on the night when he stops short of seducing Jenny any further than he already has. A worldly man, of taste and smarts, he’s nevertheless caught in a suburban prison of his own, and Sarsgaard deftly captures all this in his performance. At the same time, his vulnerability gives the lie to the risks Jenny is taking. Even as Sarsgaard makes us admire David for not taking full advantage of Jenny’s ripeness, it’s hard to worry that Jenny is straying too far afield. Though crime plays an important part in the plot—incidentally involving a fascinating real estate scheme that hinges on racist retirees—the choice he presents her is one between culture, money, and freedom on one hand and culture, money, and freedom, tainted by a few deceptions, on the other. Again, it’s a false opposition that renders the film’s larger story unconvincing.

Danny and his girlfriend Helen (Dominic Cooper and Rosamund Pike, respectively) offer more sparkle and temptation in the form of his shady deeds and her vacant beauty. Cooper’s eyes twinkle with the same hints of adventurous sexuality that so memorably enlivened his sultry student in “The History Boys”. Pike and Mulligan are splendid together, conveying both the gap between their intellects and a shared affinity for a life of style and fun. Helen plainly wants to like Jenny, but she also, just as plainly, looks at her as if she were a three-headed Martian. She is as curious about Jenny as Jenny is about her, and Pike serves up some of the movie’s funniest and warmest moments in the way she responds to Jenny’s schoolgirl pretensions with a mixture of bafflement, sisterly indulgence, and haughty scorn. The four actors make an appealing and understatedly dynamic quartet, carrying the movie along with brio, heart and a deep sense of dignity. Jenny is never felt to be slumming it.

The rest of the cast is excellent, too. Alfred Molina as Jack, Jenny’s father, gives him a sympathetic color even at his most rigid and paternalistic. The sight of him holding a tea tray, apologizing to Jenny through her door for pushing her so hard, is poignant and real. He isn’t the sort of cartoonish dictator as, say, the vein-popping meanies of “Dead Poet’s Society”. Scherfig also squeezes many laughs out of his pretensions to upper class respectability; even as David sees and exploits this chink in Jack’s armor, the film never mocks him but instead handles him with warmth and grace. Likewise Jenny’s mother: though she is an afterthought at times, Cara Seymour’s Marjorie is a study in quietly quashed dreams. Watching from the shadows is really the point of her character. Scherfig is always alert to her silent suffering as her husband bullies their daughter into sacrificing a life of freedom she never had the chance to have. The rift between generations in the home is nicely done, but less so at school. Olivia Williams valiantly tries to give Miss Stubbs, the English teacher who acts as Jenny’s mentor, a complex emotional life, but the film only allows her the opportunity to show some soul in the form of an artfully decorated flat. Emma Thompson, the headmistress, and Matthew Beard, Jenny’s clumsy suitor, are good actors trapped in dull clichés.

It is these excellent performers, led by the superb newcomer Mulligan, who make “An Education” worth watching. When Jenny tells Miss Stubbs, following a chastening series of events, “I feel old, but not very wise”, Mulligan gives the movie just the right sensibility: curiosity, youth, a self-conscious yearning for experience. The shot of Jenny lying on her back, dreamily listening to a French pop record, is a vivid and universal image of adolescence. The portrait of Jenny is loving and gracious, aching with truth, and thankfully free of sentimentality. Satisfyingly novel, too, is the feminine twist on the 60s/70s rite of passage story (“Metroland”, “The Rachel Papers”). The snark of an Oxford candidate merges with the sweet affect of a teenage girl, rather than the usual laddish nastiness. It is the voiceovers, and the positioning of Jenny’s story as the memoir of an older, wiser woman, that present a stumbling-block. Scherfig ought to have jettisoned the voiceover and let Mulligan shine forth on her own. There is more in the dimples of her beautiful smile or the keen focus of her inquisitive eyes than in the lines she speaks. “An Education” goes a little too far in trying to invest Jenny’s story with meaning, leaving the impression that Jenny herself wants to get beyond her own coming of age, forgetting that its real joys are in who she is, not where she’s going.