May 29, 1998 | The title may conjure images of wild nights, fast times and John Travolta in a bright white suit, but The Last Days of Disco is not another outbreak of Saturday Night Fever. Nor is it a behind-the-scenes, beyond-the-velvet-rope expose of trendy nightclubs that prospered during the Polyester Era. Written and directed by Whit Stillman (Metropolitan, Barcelona), this is a sharply observed and smartly written comedy of manners that evokes the Manhattan club scene of  "the very early 1980s" with equal measures of affectionate satire and wistful nostalgia. Better still, it features a solid-gold soundtrack that includes everything from "He's the Greatest Dancer" to, even more appropriately, "I Love the Nightlife."

Rather than focus on hard-core, dance-to-dawn party animals, Stillman devotes most of his movie to attractive young Ivy League graduates who might be described as disco dilettantes. They might also be described as yuppies if they were not so determined to avoid that label. "I think for a group to exist," says Des (Chris Eigeman), floor manager at the glitzy night spot where the characters congregate, "someone has to admit to being part of it."

Like many of their peers, Alice (Chloe Sevigny) and Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale) are savoring the transient rush of liberation that usually begins immediately after graduation, and lasts only until you fully commit yourself to a career and/or a significant other. For Charlotte, a self-absorbed beauty who assumes command of every situation, gliding past the elitist doorman at a trendy club modeled after Studio 54 is just one item on her crowded agenda. She also wants to find an apartment, earn a rapid promotion -- she's a low-level assistant editor at a publishing company -- and help the more demure Alice become every bit as fabulous as herself.

At first, Alice is a mite too attentive to Charlotte's words of wisdom. This leads to the first of many life lessons that are reluctantly absorbed by the movie's characters.

Other club regulars who figure prominently in Stillman's bustling universe include Jimmy (Mackenzine Astin), a junior advertising executive who's desperate to sneak his clients into the disco; Josh (Matthew Keelar), an assistant D.A. who sees very different career opportunities on and around the dance floor; Tom (Robert Sean Leonard), an attorney who credits Bambi with spawning the environmental movement; and Bernie (David Thornton), the shady club owner who leads Des to suspect the worst. "To me," the floor manager confides to a friend, "shipping cash in canvas bags to Switzerland doesn't sound honest."

As he did in his two previous films, Stillman evidences a sharp eye for revealing detail and a perfect-pitch ear for defining dialogue. He fills The Last Days of Disco with aggressively bright people who are furiously intent on peppering any and every conversation with illuminating insights. What makes them so funny, and yet also poignant, is their straight-faced sincerity. When someone mentions Lady and the Tramp, someone else launches into a detailed discussion of the cartoon's psychological subtext. Which, not surprisingly, sparks a heated debate.

Later, a self-described "adherent to the disco movement" offers a passionate elegy for the fading club scene. The speech is amusingly overwrought, but it has an affectingly melancholy edge: The speaker obviously senses that the final, frantic days of his youth are over, and real life has begun.

It's difficult, and maybe a little unfair, to single out members of the excellent ensemble cast for individual praise. Kate Beckinsale is fearlessly and often uproariously unsympathetic, while Chloe Sevigny subtly conveys an inner strength that ultimately supersedes her character's insecurities. But Chris Eigeman, a veteran of Stillman's earlier movies, is the one who dominates every scene in which he appears, and even a few in which he doesn't. A compulsive womanizer who sometimes pretends to be gay in order to rid himself of inconvenient girlfriends, Des has no shame. So it's all the more satisfying when, ultimately, he winds up with someone who's even more adept at rationalizing selfishness. Call it poetic justice, and you won't be far off the mark.