Joseph Gordon-Levitt comes of age in romcom hit

Twenty-eight-year-old American Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the former child actor who made his name in the quirky 1990s sitcom 3rd Rock from the Sun, looks set to become a huge star with his role in a highly-acclaimed film opening in Britain midweek, (500) Days of Summer. The critics are loving it and, based on its extraordinary success in the US in recent weeks, so are the public.

It's being talked of as an Annie Hall for our day, and as the best romcom since When Harry Met Sally which, coincidentally, celebrates its 20th anniversary this month.

In (500) Days, Gordon-Levitt plays Tom, an aspiring architect who makes a living writing greetings card messages - the perfect standby job for a hopeless romantic. He falls for the new office assistant Summer, played by Zooey Deschanel, who for all her ditsy charm turns out not to believe in true love or even relationships.

What makes the film unconventional is not only that the boy is the romantic and the girl the hardheaded realist, but that the story of their 500 days together is told in an apparently random order of events rather than chronologically. This enables director Marc Webb to put a break-up scene alongside a sequence in which they enjoy their first kiss.

When the low-budget film was released in American in July, it was launched at a mere 27 cinemas - compared with 4,325 screens for the new Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Word of mouth was so good that by mid-August it had been expanded to to more than 1,000 screen across the States and had taken more than $22m.

What's the secret? English novelist Nick Hornby was one of the first to be captivated when he saw it at this year's Sundance film festival, which he attended as the scriptwriter for the upcoming An Education.

Hornby blogged at the time: "I would happily watch it again. It's a romantic comedy for younger people and yet it completely failed to exclude me; it had great jokes, a good soundtrack, a fresh and imaginative sense of visual style and, unlike just about every romantic comedy I've seen in the last 20 years, it's true."

Incidentally, 29-year-old Zooey Deschanel insists she does believe in true love, whatever the character she plays may think: she's due to get married to Ben Gibbard, frontman for the indie rock band Death Cab For Cutie.

(500) Days of Summer opens at UK cinemas on September 2 ·