The thing that makes “Little Miss Sunshine” so magnificent is its refusal to not pull any punches, a fact we learn right from the very start when the Hoover family sits down to dinner. Father Richard (Greg Kinnear) is having absolutely no success selling his motivational nine-step program for success to anyone. Uncle Frank (Steve Carell) is a suicidal Proust scholar upset that his gay lover has run off with his chief professorial competition, forced to live with his sister (and family matriarch) Sheryl (Toni Collette) because the doctors think he’s still a risk to his own wellbeing. She believes in total honesty, even if said honesty just up and spills all her family’s secrets right out into the open.

That doesn’t sit well with her Nietzsche-loving teenage son Dwayne (Paul Dano). He has aspirations of going to the Air Force Academy and flying fighter jets, and he’s so serious about succeeding he’s even take a vow of silence until he gets a letter of acceptance from the prestigious military school. His grandfather (Alan Arkin) thinks the kid is acting insane, realizing himself only late in life that pursuing material gains at the expense of your own happiness is about as wasteful a life as any a human being could possibly ever live. Granted, his pursuits at the moment don’t go too far beyond nasty magazines filled with pornography and a few hits of cocaine, but at his age he figures flirting with death when he’s already so near it probably isn’t that big a deal.

Sitting between them all is seven-year-old Olive (Abigail Breslin), a four-eyed would-be beauty queen who’s latest good news might just bring the family more closer together than they could have ever imagined. You see, she’s just been invited to compete in the fiercely competitive Little Miss Sunshine pageant out in California, and with only a few short days to get there the Hoovers have to decide if their little girl’s dreams, no matter how impractical, are worth the road trip trying get her there.

Debuts just don't get better than this. Working from a freakishly original and invigorating screenplay by first-timer Michael Arndt, veteran video directors (and husband and wife) Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris have crafted what is easily one of the summer’s most wondrous melodramatic comedies. This film goes into places, corners and directions we just don’t see coming. More than a road trip, much more interesting than a satire of children’s beauty pageants, “Little Miss Sunshine” screams of a reality bristling with the complexities and abnormalities of real families.

This film is like Alexander Payne’s “Election” only without the high school or Luis Buñel’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” only substituting that flick’s aristocratic clan for a far more familiar middle class tribe jumping through hoops many of us have experienced one way or another our very selves. It is a smartly acerbic satirical masterpiece, a comedy for the ages recalling Wilder, Pierson, Crowe or Chayefsky at their absolute off-color best. The whole thing is downright fantastic, and if Arndt doesn’t at the very least get an Oscar nomination for his astonishing script than I might very well just sit back and cry.

The actors go out of their way to make all of this sing. Arkin, Kinnear and Collette are downright masterful, while young Dano follows up his phenomenal work in “L.I.E.” with a touching gem of performance light years away from that tragic independent beauty. It is Carell and Breslin who nearly steal the whole darn thing, the former going so far beyond his star-making turn in “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” you almost don’t believe your eyes. Breslin, meanwhile, touches the very center of your heart with her performance, a beguiling, innocent, split-second what-the-hell-are-you-doing glance at a singer trying to serenade pageant contestants enough to send me both into fits of chuckles and bring tears to my eyes.

But that’s the kind of thing making this movie so remarkable. Dayton and Faris don’t shy away from the dark recess of this journey, but at the same time they also don’t steer clear of the heartwarming love and emotional complexities bonding them together. Like Robert Altman, the directors let the action take place in every corner of the frame, the conversations occurring right side center every bit as interesting as what’s going on in the upper left-hand corner. Their approach is minimalist yet intimate, confident yet with just the right hint of improvisation. Quite literally, they’ve done a phenomenal job, and it's no wonder Sundance audiences almost wet themselves in enthusiasm by the time the end credits made their crawl.

In all fairness, some of it does get a little too silly for my taste, and a late act revelation concerning Dwayne just didn’t do it for me. Otherwise, this really is must-see entertainment that refuses to be forgotten. It’s funny, moving and endearing, weaving into crooks and crannies so complex and uncompromising laughs come with the cries almost in the very same breath. If filmmaking were a beauty pageant and I was a judge, radiant satires like “Little Miss Sunshine” would win my vote, and my tiara, every single time.