Name: All That She Wants
Cast: Annie Murphy, Cooper Raiff, Zosia Mamet, Christine Baranski, Bill Irwin

The generation-gap romantic comedy that landed at the Toronto International Film Festival has been greeted, almost unanimously, as the story of two well-matched people: Annie Murphy and Cooper Raiff, a millennial and a man young enough to complicate the word. That reading is warm, and it is not wrong. It is also, quietly, beside the point. All That She Wants is not a two-hander. It is a vehicle, and the person it was built to carry is Murphy.

The evidence sits in the architecture, not the plot. The screenplay comes from David West Read, a writer out of the Schitt’s Creek room; Murphy takes an executive-producer credit alongside the lead; the notices out of Toronto report a script shaped, from its first premise, around her. A film can be many things by accident, but it is a star vehicle only on purpose — and this one is on purpose.

The premise is an inversion joke that happens to carry the film’s real subject. Murphy plays Emma, a dancer whose ambitions have narrowed to commercial work and whose life restarts, after a long relationship ends, with a stranger she meets in a nightclub. The stranger, Luke, turns out to be a graduate student she once babysat. Critics have reached, understandably, for Mrs. Robinson; the more useful reference is what the film does with that lineage. It hands the older-woman, younger-man comedy back to the woman and lets her — not the situation, not the scandal — be the engine.

The inversion runs past the script and into the casting, which is where the picture is smarter than its reception. Luke is played by Cooper Raiff, and Raiff is not a leading-man hire; he is a filmmaker, the writer-director of Shithouse and Cha Cha Real Smooth, two features in which he cast himself as the searching young man whose yearning drove everything. Here, directed by Scarlett Bermingham and Andrew Rhymer, he is the object of the gaze rather than its holder — the muse, the one looked at, the younger party whose job is to ground someone else’s arc. A whole strain of millennial romance has watched Raiff want; All That She Wants is content to watch him be wanted.

What Murphy does with the space this clears for her is the review. The Toronto reception describes a turn of “exquisite comic timing” and “expressive physical humor,” an “incandescent” performance — the Alexis Rose voltage finally given a lead’s canvas instead of a supporting player’s corner. The one reservation worth keeping comes from Variety, which found that Murphy’s manic register “might feel slightly out of date,” rescued, it argued, only when filtered through Luke’s adoring perspective. That is not a small caveat; it is the film’s method. The picture routes her energy through a besotted younger point of view, which both flatters the performance and, faintly, quarantines it: the camera adores her the way Luke does, and asks us to fall in line.

The danger of any vehicle is that it flatters its passenger into weightlessness. All That She Wants mostly escapes that trap because Emma is handed something to want that the comedy takes seriously — a child, a life measured against a closing window — and because Murphy plays the wanting, not merely the quipping. Whether the film travels past the festival’s goodwill will hinge on whether audiences accept a rom-com that is, structurally, a one-woman show with an unusually generous scene partner.

It premiered as a Special Presentation and runs a trim hour and three-quarters, with David West Read’s script surrounded by a deep bench — Zosia Mamet as Emma’s sister, Christine Baranski and Bill Irwin as her parents, Finn Wittrock as the ex she leaves behind — and CAA handling the sale. The title, borrowed from a 1992 Ace of Base chorus, is a small joke about appetite that the film is disciplined enough to keep pointing at its heroine.

If Toronto is right about her, the sharper question is not whether Emma gets what she wants. It is whether the industry now builds Murphy the second vehicle — the one she does not have to produce herself to be handed.