Hugh Grant got the girl in "Notting Hill" but Rhys Ifans, as his forgetful, slovenly flatmate Spike, who modeled his scrawny body and gray underpants for the paparazzi, got the attention of critics. And the laughs.

		'Danny Deckchair' Rating: PG-13 for sex-related situations. Starring: Rhys Ifans. Director: Jeff Balsmeyer.

Ifans is the title character in "Danny Deckchair" and although he starts off like Spike with shaggy hair and scraggly beard, he morphs into a debonair head-turner. That's just part of the appeal of this quirky (if somewhat thin) Australian movie, with a salute to the "little people" and the thrill of reinventing yourself or simply finding the place where you belong.

In "Danny Deckchair," Ifans is a klutzy cement truck driver named Danny, who is looking forward to his annual camping trip with his live-in girlfriend, Trudy (Justine Clarke), who works at a real estate office. But when she has the chance to show some properties to a TV sports reporter, she bails on their trip and lies about it.

Danny overhears Trudy talking about him on the phone one day, calling his ideas, such as the human slingshot, "stupid" and his behavior weird. "He's one of the little people," she says, with derision. However, he becomes a celebrity when one of his odd little pranks takes off, literally and figuratively.

Assisted by his pals at a barbecue in his suburban Sydney back yard, Danny inflates and ties helium balloons onto an aluminum webbed lawn chair. Before his preparations are finished, he takes off into the sky. When he goes missing, he becomes the subject of breathless news stories. But it also gives him a chance to start anew, an irresistible theme as old as storytelling itself.

Most of the fun of "Danny Deckchair" is in watching Danny blossom, charting the media circus and seeing how behavior that's considered "crazy" in one place can be "inspired" in another. Ifans is like a modern-day, zany Jimmy Stewart, champion of the unsung heroes who keep the wheels of society turning.

Ifans leads a cast that includes Clarke along with Miranda Otto (Eowyn of Rohan in two "Lord of the Rings" installments) and less well-known actors.

Lest you think Danny is daft, the movie's production notes assure us that "a man in the UK went up in a banana chair, a guy in California went up in a patio chair and a woman in Denmark went up with just a harness attached to her limbs. There is, in fact, a sport called 'cluster ballooning' where people just attach balloons to themselves and see where it takes them."

Such flights of fancy helped to provide the inspiration for writer-director Jeff Balsmeyer, who lets the story bounce along on a cloud of peppy pop tunes.

It's all about as heavy as helium, which isn't such a bad thing in the waning days of summer.