Albert Nobbs – review

Meryl Streep must be quaking in her court shoes. That 2012 best actress Oscar was all but ready-etched with Streep's name for her turn as Margaret Thatcher in biopic The Iron Lady (out at the start of next year), but her main rival in the race is looking like an increasingly smart bet.

No surprise, really: Glenn Close has been trying to get a film of George Moore's 19th century-set novella off the ground ever since she won rave reviews for the role off-Broadway in 1982. And that 30-year gap would explain some of the casting kinks that are the sole distraction in this sly and intriguing period piece.

"I think you're the strangest man I've ever met," someone remarks at one point to our hero, and they've got a point. Albert Nobbs seems a deeply weird – perhaps even too freaky – chap, with his odd appearance and titchy figure and strangled voice and unwillingness to socialise. Reason being: he's a she – something discovered by a jobbing painter who's forced to share Nobbs's garret attic at the Dublin hotel where he's employed. But as luck would have it, the painter has a similar secret, and Nobbs, desperate for a bosom buddy, takes inspiration from their story, in particular the fact that he/she appears to have secured themselves a wife. So he embarks on a mission to woo unwitting maid Mia Wasikowska – an enterprise that seems doomed to disaster given Nobbs's lack of obvious charms. Plus new boiler-boy Aaron Johnson is on the scene – forever shovelling coal in unbuttoned tops.

Close is, obviously, terrific, and the gradual stripping off of her layers of artifice is highly affecting and artistically justified, as well as machine-tooled for the awards showreel. What makes Rodrigo García's movie more than the sum of just one part is the space and time devoted to the supporting cast, from Pauline Collins's flirt of a landlady to Brendan Gleeson's boozy hotel doctor. Janet McTeer, too infrequently seen on screen (though she's also in the forthcoming The Woman in White) is astonishing as the painter, and Mia Wasikowska adds more heart to the dimpled maid role than it requires.

I'm not totally convinced by the coherence or ultimate import of the gender-bending theme (there's a fancy dress party; plus chat about how clothes maketh the man). But it barely matters. Despite that title and those roots, this is a gripping ensemble piece, good-humoured even at the end of its tether. "Dear Jesus, I don't know why everyone has to have such miserable lives," exclaims Gleeson. Nobbs keeps impressively merry, given its misery.