GIVEN the queue forming at Platform 9 for Harry Potter, it might be that Ghost World will be released into a ghostly world, ignored by the stampeding millions.

How apt that would be for this Heathers for 2001, a smart and original American comedy that mocks - at least initially - the way everyone is doing the same thing in homogenised cities that have become too identical and indistinguishable: the ghost worlds of the title first featured in Daniel Clowes's underground comic book.

There is, in other words, another world beyond HP. Take, for example, the non-conformist Enid (Thora Birch), who delights in wearing retro tortoiseshell specs, thrift-store garb and gaudy lipstick and despises all around her.

She and best friend Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) are, on a bored teenage whim, opting out of college, mundane domesticity and the unattainable circuit of perfect boyfriends and dream jobs. They're into Seventies punk, vinyl only; they're into cool, disaffected rebellion, cynical one liners and negative one-upmanship and, like a malevolent antidote to Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amelie, they are out to ruin someone else's day via abusing the personal ads.

Latest victim is Seymour (America's supreme slimy character actor Steve Buscemi), a sagging, goofball, middle-aged collector of 78 records. Fixing up a date, Enid is out to mock him but soon warms to his own more articulate cynicism, his aversion to mediocrity, conservative behaviour and consumer obsession.

The sands are shifting from beneath her, and from assured independence she clings to Seymour; friendship with Rebecca disintegrates when Rebecca calls time on what was "just a phase", and Enid becomes ever more uncertain of her outsider stance.

Her clothes change, gradually becoming more conventional, and as each of her prejudices is confounded and knocked down, so Enid is sucked into the ever-oppressive American Dream. It is here that director Terry Zwigoff and co-writer Clowes lose their sense of subversion in an allegorical finale that says ultimately there is no dysfunctional alternative to the Dream. Her comeuppance is a letdown.