THE big talking point in The Station Agent is the first serious, lead role for a dwarf. Goodbye Mini-Me in Austin Powers and that little guy who ended up packed away in the suitcase in Man With The Golden Gun.

Writer-director Tom McCarthy won the Waldo Salt screenwriting prize and his debut feature won the audience award at last year's Sundance Film Festival, testimony to the skill, craft and originality of his short and bittersweet indie movie.

Peter Dinklage, handsome with magnetic eyes, plays Fin, a solemn, stoical and solitary figure, at his happiest when left alone to enjoy his enthusiasm for trains, both real and in the model train shop where he works.

After the similarly self-contained shop owner dies suddenly, Fin's life changes track. He has inherited an abandoned train depot in the aptly named Newfoundland, New Jersey, once home to the station agent.

Writing with subtlety yet with plenty of sting and a grumpiness normally associated with the English, McCarthy depicts how Fin is forced to break his solitude when faced by the curious, screwed-up inhabitants of the backwater small town.

Some treat him as freak show; others, suppressed outsiders just like him, seek to connect.

Loud hot dog salesman Joe (Bobby Cannavale) pushes him like a puppy, trying to befriend him; the blonde librarian (Michelle Williams) makes a move on him; accident-prone artist Olivia (Patricia Clarkson) twice nearly runs him down but has that sexy old woman thing going on, as Bobby notes, although the loss of her son tears at her heart.

Amid whimsy worthy of Frank Capra, McCarthy creates complex, vulnerable, unsettling characters, thereby ensuring that The Station Agent is a comic drama with dignity, deadpan wit and not one patronising note.

Updated: 15:57 Thursday, March 25, 2004