With credits that include such popular films as Wag the Dog, The Untouchables and The Spanish Prisoner, as well as beloved plays like "American Buffalo" and "Glengarry Glen Ross," writer-director David Mamet creates hype with a click of a ballpoint.

So it's little surprise that his latest movie, State and Main, about a small town besieged by a Hollywood production company, is being touted by the folks in New York and Los Angeles as one of the top movies of the year.

But while State and Main, which Mamet wrote and directed, is packed with the actor-friendly, clipped-quip dialogue for which he is known, its story demonstrates a tendency toward convention and stereotype you wouldn't expect from such a veteran. It's not the witty, clever-yet-deep film you might expect, coming across instead as a lightly funny, lazy exercise in mining the obvious humor value of thrusting a big city film crew into a Northeastern backwoods hamlet.

That's pretty much it, but here's a quick recap: For some unknown reason, probably having to do with star Bob Barrenger's (Alec Baldwin) attraction — no, addiction — to teenage girls, the director and crew of a movie called The Old Mill had to abandon its site in Connecticut and find a new town.

At first, Waterford, Vt., seems perfect. It's quiet, sleepy and its citizens are dazzled enough by Hollywood that they'll let the crew in for free. It even has an Old Mill, which is good because the production lacks the money to build a new one from scratch. (That pesky Connecticut town is apparently holding the first set for ransom.)

But when the crew finds out Waterford's Old Mill burned down in 1960, writer Joseph Turner White (Philip Seymour Hoffman) has to rewrite the film ... without the Old Mill.

Local theater director and bookstore owner Ann Black (Rebecca Pidgeon) is just the person to come to Joe's rescue. Despite her engagement to a state-Senate-aspiring megalomaniac (Clark Gregg), the script-savvy Ann and Joe fall in love.

Meanwhile, Barrenger doesn't take long to fall under the seductive sway of the town's teenage temptress (Julia Stiles). And when it all comes crashing down, literally, the only witness is the innocent, stammering Joe, who's faced with the not-so-novel choice of career vs. morals.

Naturally, there's a lot of missing from that rundown, but it's not hard to see that Mamet's story isn't quite as compelling as those of his last two films, The Spanish Prisoner and The Winslow Boy. With the exception of a couple of goofy, largely uninteresting subplots, there's little here we haven't already seen.

Joe excepted, the movie industry folks are immoral, money-grabbing, cell-phone-using boors with big paychecks and bad attitudes. Waterford, on the other hand, is filled to the brim with overalls-wearing, Farmer's Almanac-wisdom-spouting oldsters and women who wear plaid flannel shirts with patches on the elbows. Nobody seems to own a computer, but if you want a manual typewriter or four, you can head on over to Ann's bookstore, which probably also has some washboards lying around in back. It's all a little too hard to swallow.

While this oddball, small-town charm worked wonders on TV shows such as "Twin Peaks" and "Northern Exposure" (hell, even "Picket Fences"), it was largely because the writers of those shows had a knack for invention. The folks in State and Main have no Agent Cooper-calibre quirks, other than the doctor who drinks — itself hardly a novel concept — and though what comes out of their mouths is often compelling, they themselves are not.

And then there's Pidgeon, who's given the richest role but seems the most out of place. Though she's certainly a cute match for the doughy Hoffman, her oddball, suspicion-arousing diction — so effective in The Spanish Prisoner — seems out of place at times, especially for a woman who owns a porch swing and still lives in the town where she was born.

In other words, it's a shame because the talent Mamet has drawn to this film shouldn't be wasted. William H. Macy, Patti LuPone, Hoffman, Sarah Jessica Parker and Baldwin work with what they have, delivering first-rate, well-acted lines from the cookie-cutter roles given to them. In Parker's case, it'd be easy to feel sorry for her — she's stuck playing a ditzy actress who won't doff her top for the movie, even though her breasts can be "drawn from memory," as one executive asserts. But you can't muster much sympathy because Parker is clearly talented enough to see this joke through to its too-far-away end.

And that's pretty much the case with the rest of the actors. Read the interviews and no one's complaining about the movie's glaring continuity error involving a dry erase board, an accidental bump and a missed appointment (watch as the weight, color and location of the writing changes from shot to shot). Rather, the actors seem to be thrilled just to be acting in a Mamet movie, reciting those brilliant lines.

— Eric Wittmershaus (eric@flakmag.com)