Songcatcher.

Songcatcher * Written and directed by Maggie Greenwald * Starring Janet McTeer, Emmy Rossum, Jane Adams, and Aidan Quinn * Lions Gate

The movie song of the year was written hundreds of years ago, drifting across the Atlantic Ocean from its Celtic birthplace and plopping itself down in the Appalachians. "Barbara Allen," the apotheosis of mountain folk ballads, receives no less than three different renditions in Maggie Greenwald's Songcatcher. And if it doesn't haunt your mind's ears for weeks after seeing the film, you may need to reconsider your music priorities.

Songcatcher is set in 1907, the year a minister's wife by the name of Olive Campbell heard an Appalachian schoolgirl sing "Barbara Allen" and was soon after inspired to collect the area's indigenous folk songs. Maggie Greenwald's film is a singing valentine, embracing both the local women who passed on this musical tradition to successive generations and file Olive Campbells who undertook the task of sorting it all for the world to hear. While it never entirely lifts off the ground as a piece of moviemaking, its archival achievements are so rich you may not care.

Greenwald's breakthrough film was 1993's The Ballad of Little Jo, an absorbing, fact-based drama of a proper 19th-century woman who survives in the Wild West by impersonating a man. Genteel ladies who learn to cut loose are obviously figures of fantasy and veneration for Greenwald. For Songcatcher she has invented a buttoned-down musicologist named Dr. Lily Penleric who abandons her cosseted, male-dominated academic life to research the musical traditions of Appalachia.

In an interesting but ultimately unsuccessful stroke of casting, Greenwald has tapped British actor Janet McTeer to play Lily. The six-foot McTeer left us breathless as the vivacious single mom in Tumbleweeds, a hyperkinetic Nora in an imported London stage version of A Doll's House, and a malcontent hausfrau in The King Is Alive. But she's an artist of restless technique and simmering sensuality, which need an outlet. In Songcatcher you can feel her sitting on her preternatural instincts in the effort to be uptight and prudish. It's an odd, ungainly fit, a corset three sizes too small.

McTeer also seems a little too canny for some of the script's more conventional plot turns, as Lily is met with initial resistance by the locals and ends up falling for the scruffy but sensitive mountain man (Aidan Quinn) who gives her the hardest time. Greenwald fortunately avoids idealizing Lily as she comes to terms with the sexual relationship shared by her sister Elna (Jane Adams) and Elna's older colleague Harriet (E. Katherine Kerr).

The Elna-Harriet partnering is depicted with candor and empathy, becoming for better or worse a pivotal plot point in the script's melodramatic tailspin. For all of Songcatcher's emotional flash points, it's a strangely flat picture. Greenwald isn't much of a stylist, and too many of her hardened hill folk (with the shining exception of Pat Carroll as the resident earth mother) look like union-toughened actors.

Happily, the songs (arranged by Greenwald's husband, David Mansfield) and their musical interpreters are the real McCoy. Greenwald lets the music breathe, and the music lets Songcatcher breathe. When David Patrick Kelly, Hazel Dickens, and Bobby McMillon share a "Conversation With Death," it's magic time. And when the incandescent Emmy Rossum opens her lungs and pours forth "Barbara Allen," you feel a shiver that tells you something about what Olive Campbell must have felt when she heard a schoolgirl sing 94 years ago.

Stuart is the author of The Nashville Chronicles: The Making of Robert Altman's Masterpiece (Simon and Schuster).