SPELLBINDING, SPARKY AND SIX YEARS OLD

The Florida Project (15) Verdict: Dazzling and memorable

THIS beguiling film is notable for all sorts of reasons.

It gives Willem Dafoe one of his best roles for years, as the stressed but kindly manager of a shabby motel complex near Orlando.

And it depicts the lives of a disenfranchised Florida underclass far more compellingly than last year’s wildly over-garlanded movie Moonlight.

But perhaps above all, it has a performance by a child actor — six-year-old Brooklynn Prince — that has to be seen to be believed.

Her precocious brilliance reminded me of Tatum O’Neal in the 1973 movie Paper Moon, for which O’Neal won an Academy Award.

Prince plays Moonee, whose existence on the margins of society (yet in the shadow of Disney World) with her feckless single mother Halley (newcomer Bria Vinaite, also superb) would be devoid of all hope were it not for her infectious enthusiasm for life.

Moonee is a force of nature: relentlessly mischievous, ferociously bright, impossibly cute. But like everyone else in this film, she is a fully-rounded human being.

Halley, for example, little more than a child herself, is beyond redemption in many ways. She steals, cons and works as a prostitute. Yet, underneath it all, she has all the right motherly impulses.

And Bobby, Dafoe’s character, is heartrendingly decent and principled, even when it might be easier not to be.

The narrative is episodic, leading to an enigmatic ending that I thought was slightly fudged.

Nonetheless, the film’s director and co-writer, Sean Baker, has parlayed his limited budget into one of the most memorable pictures I’ve seen all year.