In its titles Smoke parades as a film by Chinese-American director Wayne Wang and American novelist Paul Auster. By reputation, Wang saw Auster's Auggie Wren's Christmas Story in The New York Times on Christmas Day 1990. He contacted the author and proposed turning his slender tale into a feature. Several years and other projects later, it arrives on screen bookending this charming little film.

Smoke has very little in the way of dramatics, drawing on chance and coincidence to tell its tale. It's set in 1990, in the run-up to the Gulf War, where Auggie (the ubiquitous Harvey Keitel) owns The Brooklyn Cigar Company. Among his regulars is Paul (William Hurt), a blocked novelist whose wife died in a drive-by shooting outside the store a few years before. The writer's own life is saved on the street one day by a smart-mouthed black lad calling himself Rashid (Harold Perrineau) and an uneasy friendship develops.

Meanwhile, Auggie's old girlfriend Ruby (Stockard Channing) turns up to tell him that they have a pregnant crackhead of a daughter who now lives in the city. By the end, Auggie's past has been laid to some kind of rest, Paul will be writing again, and Rashid reunited with his one-armed father Cyrus (a magnificent Forest Whitaker).

To look at the script (usefully published with the original short story, by Faber) is to see long tracts of dialogue punctuated by a lot of scene setting. This is another film where people talk all the time, the spotlight lingering on actors and not effects. And with actors of this calibre, that's surely enough.

Keitel gets to prove he can do something other than strip off and kill people; his amiable stogy-toting proprietor is terrific, even breaking into the occasional Cheshire Cat smirk. Hurt, though, is the real surprise. After splashing big with Body Heat and an Oscar from Kiss of The Spider Woman, his career plummeted to earth. His novelist -- a quiet man crushed by life -- marks the actor's best work in a decade. The supporting cast -- Giancarlo Esposito, Jared Harris, Ashley Judd, Channing, and especially the debuting Perrineau -- are all excellent.

Still, however good Auster's script (and it really is very good), it falls not unnaturally to Wang to pull this together, which he does so unselfconsciously as to make the film look as though it's almost directing itself. Much is secured in long, languorous scenes with almost no coverage, production designer Kalina Ivanov conspiring to make this believable, from the cigar store through Hurt's New York apartment which, for once in a movie, isn't the size of a baseball field. Wang establishes his camera and lets the film move in front. Only at the end does the style manoeuvre toward occasional cutaways, and a couple of fierce close-ups as Keitel performs his barn-storming final ten minutes, reciting Auster's short story straight to camera.

Smoke is part of a matched pair -- Auster and Wang are going to make the improvised Blue In The Face -- but works superbly in its own right. It is a film not concerned with simple heroes or villains but of ordinary people tossed by fate and circumstance; imagine Altman's Short Cuts writ small. Its deceptive skill masks film-making of considerable strength, its humanity palpable without resort to feeble-minded sentiment.