Clockwatchers.

In a summer filled with bone-head bonanzas about big rocks colliding with the Earth and a rubbery uber-lizard terrorizing New York, it is refreshing that Clockwatchers has wandered its way into being a minor hit.

Not that this film about four American women working as temps is well known. It's received little in the way of television or print advertising, but it sticks out like a wildflower among the weeds, with $8 per ticket thorns.

Toni Collette (Muriel's Wedding) stars as Iris, a shy and repressed young woman who takes a temporary job at Global Credit. And how horrific is this place? The background music is the sort of mind-numbing crap designed to keep the inhabitants from uprising, the fluorescent lights look as though they kill brain cells, and the minute hand on the clock taunts office workers by briefly moving backwards before going forwards. Fear, loathing, and eventually paranoia add to the general malaise.

There's also the cast of sub-human characters that inhabit most corporations: an officious office manager who has the ability to simultaneously smile and suck the life out of you; a supply person unwilling to part with his inventory (though, when others aren't looking, he plays with it); and bosses that hang on to the hierarchical structure the way a drowning man would cling to a life preserver.

Any sane human being would walk out the first day. But maybe that's the point: Where's Iris going to go? If her life were that easy, she wouldn't be in this mess in the first place.

Iris's descent into hell on earth is guided by Margaret (Parker Posey), the tough ringleader of the temps, who despises the male corporate drones she works for but sucks up to them anyway to get noticed for a full-time gig.

Newsweek recently dubbed Posey "Queen of the Indie" films. But maybe it's her talents as an actress, her energy on screen, and the restraints of corporate cinema that keep her from becoming the next Sandra Bullock. No complaints here.

The other two members of the clique are Paula (Lisa Kudrow), who fantasizes about being an actress, and Jane (Alanna Ubach), who is patiently counting down the days until she gets married to her cheating boyfriend.

The four women become fast friends in the way adolescents do. They smoke, hang in the bathroom, ridicule other office employees, and go out after work--these are all the enjoyments they have in their drab, dreary, less-than-ordinary lives.

Then the friendships start to erode--inevitably, given that the four are transients who work and play together longer than they should. Each begins to create conspiracies about the others. But they reserve most of their suspicion for Margaret, who, after her only chance of going full time is buried, tries to persuade the other temps to strike.

Sarcasm and cynicism are one thing, but militancy cannot be tolerated.

Nor does it seem possible, given their vulnerability. These four women work for men who treat them like chattel, and they are all just one phone call away from being replaced.

The treatment of the corporate underclass--assistants, secretaries, mailroom clerks--has not changed much since the movie 9 to 5, the film that Clockwatchers most closely resembles.

In that 1980 film, Jane Fonda stars as a recently divorced woman who takes a job as a secretary in a large corporation. She forms a bond with two other women, Dolly Parton and Lily Tomlin, and all three are demeaned and abused by a male chauvinist boss named Franklin Hart Jr. (played by Dabney Coleman).

As with Clockwatchers, 9 to 5 did not win high praise from many critics, who were more knocked back by Dolly Parton's talented movie debut and her title song (nominated for an Oscar) than by the glimpse into what a male-dominated business world offers women.

Franklin Hart Jr. gets his payback in the end, which should lead anyone who has had to endure countless hours of demeaning treatment to cheer. But his comeuppance is a Hollywood-induced fantasy, which overwhelms the subtleties of friendship, compassion, and perseverance that the movie also portrayed.

Though both movies are political, 9 to 5 is a big-budget, slapstick picture with left-wing pretensions, while Clockwatchers is sharper and more targeted: It strikes at the core of a generation of well-educated women and men who have ambition stamped out of them before their lives really get under way.

The market for temps, by the way, is booming. The largest employer in the country today is not GM but a temporary agency, Manpower, Inc.

The women of 9 to 5 had full-time jobs; the women in Clockwatchers would be envious of their security. Neither set has what one would consider a "good" job, but in most cases, today's temping opportunities offer no benefits, and no longterm job satisfaction. A percentage of temp pay goes to the agency. As for the "corporate family," you are not welcome at the dinner table.

However skillfully it depicts the temp-worker predicament, Clockwatchers falls short when it comes to some social realities. A 1996 survey by an economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics discovered that "contingent workers," the government's official name for temps, were more likely to be "female, black, young, enrolled in school, and employed in services and construction industries...more than 10 percent were teachers."

It is interesting to note that all four of the temps in Clockwatchers are white; Iris is substituting for a black worker who is, according to office scuttlebutt, at home collecting insurance from a bogus workers' compensation claim. Given the government's stats, the roles should be reversed. Which gets me thinking: Would this indie film have been made if it were about four black women who work for a man?

Clockwatchers comes to us by way of the Sprecher sisters--Jill (writer-director) and Karen (writer-producer). "I think my sister and I envisioned it as a fable about self-doubt, which to us is universal," said Jill Sprecher in a recent interview. "But I think that women experience it in a different way, worrying about how others see them."

And self-doubt is everywhere. Even the "pretty girl" (Lisa Kudrow) is invisible to her male employers. In other words, if you're not a career woman with an MBA and a sultry look, you have no chance.

"We also wanted a feeling of transience--which is why we made the characters temps," Sprecher said. "I think there's a lot of inherent drama in any office, because it's where people spend the majority of their lives. There's a political hierarchy there with all kinds of potential for drama. We tried to capture how quickly friendships are made and broken today. We live in this world that's very mobile, allowing people to be phased out of their jobs so that they're not quite sure what their position is in society anymore."

Some critics have harped on how tedious the film is: the endless clock-watching, Margaret carving her desk over and over again, the slow-motion shots of people doing odd sorts of things throughout the day.

But this is precisely the point of the film--how creativity, joy, love, lust, and other impulses are drained from people every minute and hour that they sit in their cubicles waiting for the clock to hit 5:00 P.M.

Claudia Dreifus is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute of the New School for Social Research. Her recent collection, "Interview," is published by Seven Stories Press.