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'Wordplay' is smart and it knows it

The only reason some of us use a pencil when attempting a crossword puzzle is to break it when we smack the inevitable, inflexible wall of frustration. Ink pens tend to splat when snapped in two.

Crossword solvers who use pens are either really cocky or really good, very often both. Comedian Jon Stewart, President Bill Clinton and the Indigo Girls — dedicated puzzlers all — use pens. They think fast, scribble with gusto, and put most crossword dilettantes to horrible, depressing shame. Watching Stewart rattle through a New York Times puzzle in the buoyant documentary "Wordplay" is to crush your own cross-worth. Who needs an eraser when right answers fly from your head like popcorn?

IFC Films 'Wordplay' 3 out of 5 stars The verdict: Fills in the blanks with crossword enthusiasm Director: Patrick Creadon Cast: Will Shortz, Merl Reagle, Jon Stewart, Ken Burns, Indigo Girls Run time: 84 minutes Release date: June 16, 2006 Rating: PG for mild language. See showtimes Puzzle Potentate Meet Will Shortz, editor of the New York Times crossword puzzle and NPR Puzzle Master. On the web Official movie site View the trailer    Trailers require Quicktime Rate 'Wordplay'   Go see it   Make it a matinee   Wait to rent   Don't bother Voter Limit: Once per Hour View Poll Results

A movie requires a star and "Wordplay" finds its topliner in Will Shortz, the popular editor of The New York Times crossword puzzle and the "Puzzle Master" on National Public Radio. Shortz is a consummate nerd, soft-spoken, congenial, donning a big mustache that caps an avuncular smile. Clearly, his placid exterior belies a brain bristling with dweeby commotion.

Which seems to be the case with all of the virtuoso puzzle people we meet in "Wordplay." They demonstrate busy, supple minds with instant access to the dusty attics and dank basements of the brain, places most of us have to ransack to find what we're looking for. They can unriddle that 17 across clue "Asia Minor capital" in a snap, while we rummage and riffle, chewing our pencil into sawdust. (Notably, the group of brainiacs director Patrick Creadon dotes on are a suspiciously homogeneous lot: bookish, quirky, successful, white and mostly New Yorkers. One is female.)

If Shortz isn't the most interesting guy in the world — let alone in this agreeable portrait of an egghead subculture — his job is innately compelling. Shortz doesn't publish his own crosswords in The New York Times, instead using puzzles by 110 contributors, a few of whom are in the film and reveal some tricks and rules. Shortz wants to "stretch people's brains and bring joy to their lives." Sometimes he fails; he reads aloud angry mail that can only come from the fussy pen of the crossword zealot.

Creadon makes his enthusiasm for crossword culture easily understandable. Here, the gray and homely crossword puzzle emerges as not just a daily grid of grief and glory but a kind of demi-science, engineered out of precise mathematical logic. It's why many speed solvers — those who can complete a Monday New York Times puzzle in two minutes — are in the math professions or are musicians, such as pianist and master puzzler Jon Delfin, who, like his fellow solvers, knows the prize of finishing is not a decrypted surprise, but the simple gratification of conquest.

Delfin joins a handful of "Wordplay's" characters in Stamford, Conn., for the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, which was co-founded by Shortz in 1978. The movie's second half is dedicated to the 28th edition of the multiday contest, a low-tech affair set in a hotel ballroom with about 500 contestants who treat the annual convention like a family reunion.

After loping at a tweedy pace, establishing the supportive fellowship between these word nerds, the movie suddenly scrunches up into a ball of well-earned tension, not unlike the verbal showdown in the spelling-bee doc "Spellbound." Nimble editing and canny onscreen graphics showing the crossword grids being tackled by feverish competitors put you in the heat of battle. Director Creadon lucks out with the match's exhilarating payoff, a snap of pathos and humor that lets us share the deflation of defeat and the electricity of victory.

We're also provided the modest comfort that even the best solvers can crash and burn. Cries a contestant who does just that, "I got two words into it and, boom, my head exploded!" We know the feeling.