Not the type of learning she had in mind

Every now and then a performance comes along that takes the film world by storm. Here, it's Carey Mulligan's star-making turn as a 16-year-old schoolgirl who falls under the spell of an older man in early '60s London in An Education.

Topped by a fine cast, a first-rate script by Nick Hornby and tight direction by Lone Scherfig, the film is smart, moving but not inaccessible entry in the coming-of-age canon.

Scherfig and her team – production designer Andrew McAlpine and costume designer Odile Dicks-Mireaux – do a convincing job creating a repressed London still reeling from the war and not yet exploding with the counterculture. It's a period when a shift is just starting to stir.

It's a fearful, drab world, and no one is more bored with it than Jenny (Mulligan), a straight-A student at a stuffy all-girls school. She's a bright kid with a yearning for culture and all things French. Her ambition is to wear black, smoke cigarettes, read books and try anything new.

Enter David (Peter Sarsgaard), a knight in a shining sports car who gives her an education she definitely wasn't expecting.

Their meeting in the pouring rain on a London street is one of the cutest of meet-cutes. A music lover, David tells her to put the cello she's carrying into his car to keep it dry and walk alongside since she surely wouldn't take a ride with a strange man. Who could resist? Certainly not this curious, impressionable girl.

The biggest obstacle to their budding relationship is Jenny's father, Jack (Alfred Molina), a strict but loving middle-class parent who remembers the hard times of the war years and only wants the best for his daughter. That means Oxford, and he makes sure, in his sometimes overbearing way, that Jenny has the right extra curricular activities to get in.

Danny is not one of those activities, but he sweet-talks Jack into allowing him to take Jenny to a concert in the West End, which to Jack seems like an exotic place. One thing leads to another, and before long David is taking Jenny off to Oxford for the weekend, which in Jack's distorted vision will be an asset to furthering her education.

The education she is getting has more to do with sultry singers in jazz clubs, fine food and an unknown world of expensive things. For his part, David is sweet: He's not an ogre, and he respects Jenny's limits.

Hornby's script keeps up the character's mystery, and Scherfig wisely doesn't push it. Eventually, what he's up to is revealed, and it's not on the up and up.

But Jenny is smitten and turns 17 in Paris, her dream come true. At that age, a child doesn't have the judgment to see what's happening, and that's where parents should step in, but Jack and his wife (Cara Seymour) are blinded by the upward mobility the noveau riche David represents for the family.

Jenny doesn't understand the subtle class warfare at work here; all she sees is a way out of her dreary life, but perhaps one that threatens her future. Mulligan captures every nuance of the character with an understated charm reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn. Her transformation from an English schoolgirl in a gray uniform to a lovely young and desirable woman is nothing short of miraculous.

But without Sarsgaard's restrained and morally ambiguous performance, Mulligan would not be able to shine as brightly. Dominic Cooper is suitably smarmy as Danny, David's best friend and partner in crime, and Rosamund Pike as his party girl girlfriend is a perfect new role model for Jenny.

What makes An Education a special piece of work are the social forces going on beneath the surface that inform these all-too-human characters.