The eleventh annual Rhode Island International Film Festival kicks off tonight with a splashy party at the Providence Performing Arts Center and several new short independent films on screen, including ones directed by actors Jennifer Aniston and Bryce Dallas Howard.

The festival begins in earnest tomorrow with screenings all over the city, including the Cable Car Cinema, which will present what promises to be one of the better feature films in the series, Hollywood Dreams, at 7 p.m.

This offbeat romantic comedy is ostensibly about a young woman with stars in her eyes from Mason City, Iowa (“the hometown of Meredith Willson who wrote The Music Man,” she says), who arrives in Tinseltown to find her fame in the movies, but finds her plan thrown off course by an unlikely romance. But there’s much more to her story, whose ups and downs surprise and often delight.

Hollywood Dreams is the latest from director Henry Jaglom, whose slightly offbeat romantic comedies — Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?, Last Summer in the Hamptons among them — have charmed art house audiences since the 1970s. Hollywood Dreams is both offbeat and romantic, but with a surprising pitch-perfect twist at the end.

Hollywood, a land of larger-than-life fantasy, seems the perfect place for Margie Chizek (Tanna Frederick), a vivacious, if not quite beautiful, mass of nervous energy who is prone to dramatic weepiness, especially when she can’t quite get through a reading for an upcoming play at an audition or when she’s dumped from the apartment she shares for not paying her bills and general incompetence. She’s even kicked off a grade-school movie by the kid director for not being able to stay within the boundaries of its simple script.

But the gods smile on this lost lamb when Margie accidentally bumps into a self-styled “major producer/manager” who has a stable talent he’s developing. Kaz (Zak Norman) likes the slightly goofy, nervous Margie who’s awkward and yet has a great likable naturalness, as played by Frederick. He takes her home, sets her up in the guest house, which already happens to be occupied by the good-looking Robin Mack (Justin Kirk), who is trying to make his name in Hollywood as a gay actor. Or is he? Sexual politics is a game played by a lot of people in L.A. and Hollywood Dreams revolves around the fantasies that newcomers to the movie mecca manufacture about themselves to create an aura. The film is as much about sexual role playing as it is about real life.

Things get a little sticky when Robin begins making passes at Margie, something that makes not only Margie but both Kaz and his gay partner Caesar (David Proval) anxious, for they’ve gotten interest from some top players in Hollywood because Robin has been billed as a homosexual. Also worried is faded star Luna (Karen Black), who discovered Robin.

Margie turns out to have secrets of her own, a fantasy life that goes beyond her attempts to build herself into the new Rita Hayworth. Her secrets spill out when her Aunt Bea (Melissa Leo of Homicide: Life on the Street) arrives from Iowa.

There are a few sequences in which characters delve into a bit of soul searching that slows the film. But mostly Hollywood Dreams moves briskly and has enough quirky moments and off-the-wall surprises, coupled with oddball characters, to keep one entertained. Although Frederick at first seems impossible as the skitterish Margie, she develops into a sympathetic, if troubled character. She has a wonderful moment of self recognition in the film’s final shot as Margie, a woman who has lived her life as though she were reading lines in a movie, discovers that the script has changed at the last minute. Hollywood Dreams forces its characters to decide whether fame and ambition are more important than love. It’s a question not easily answered.

mjanuson@projo.com