Ballerina-turned-actress Neve Campbell shows us the tutu life.

Actress Neve Campbell once studied ballet, and she wants you to know it. She came up with the story (what little there is) and co-produced The Company, Robert Altman’s cinematic valentine to the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, in which Campbell stars as a young dancer on the rise.

Campbell trained for two years for the dancing her role requires, and she looks like a professional onscreen next to the other dancers, who are portrayed by professional Joffrey dancers. In fact, beyond Campbell and a scant handful of other actors in fictional roles, the film plays like a backstage documentary. This is part of its charm for ballet lovers, as real-life dancers, ballet masters, stage crews, and accompanists go through their paces onscreen; entire ballets are staged for the camera, and choreographers Lar Lubovitch and Robert Desrosiers are seen rehearsing their works.

But as entertaining as the film often is, the documentary approach backfires dramatically. Uncertain when and how to impose fiction onto the relatively authentic backstage material, Altman and screenwriter Barbara Turner opt for little snippets and glimmers of storylines that flutter moth-like to life for a moment, then disappear.

In the main story, corps dancer Ry (Campbell) steps into her first principal role in Lubovitch’s My Funny Valentine, a gorgeous pas de deux (with Domingo Rubio) danced on an open-air stage during a thunderstorm in the film’s most dramatic sequence. After hours Ry connects with Josh (James Franco), a sexy sous-chef at a popular bistro, who not only looks like James Dean (a role Franco played in a TNT movie), but gets up in the morning to cook her breakfast. Not much dramatic conflict there.

Malcolm McDowell stomps around cheerfully as company director Antonelli (loosely modeled on real-life Joffrey director Gerald Arpino), dispensing platitudes and rough diplomacy, but none of his potentially stormy encounters with artists or creditors ever pays off. Neither do scattered plot threads involving Ry’s nagging mom, a restless principal dancer (Davis Robertson), or a self-doubting corps dancer bullied by a domineering mentor, while only fleeting lip service is paid to drugs, the toll of AIDS on the dance world, and the agony of dancers’ injuries.

On the plus side, we get to see some wonderful ballets (including Desrosiers’ energetic fun-house fable Blue Snake) from all angles before and behind the footlights; as the camera prowls onstage, we hear the footfalls and see the painstaking effort it takes to look effortless.

THE COMPANY [2 1/2 stars]

Directed by Robert Altman

Starring Neve Campbell, James Franco, Malcolm McDowell, Lar Lubovitch, Robert Desrosiers.

(Rated PG-13, 112 mins.)