True, Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) could use a good haircut and a wardrobe update, but what recent college grad couldn't? To the unpracticed eye, she looks well-scrubbed, healthy and happy.

Meryl Streep, left, portrays Miranda Priestly, the formidable and demanding editor of a fashion magazine, who hires Andy Sachs, played by Anne Hathaway, to be her assistant in "The Devil Wears Prada." Click photo for larger image. 'The Devil Wears Prada' Rating: PG-13 for some sensuality. Starring: Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway. Director: David Frankel. Family Film Guide Web site: www.devilwearspradamovie.com

To the fashionistas at Runway magazine, where she improbably finds herself interviewing for a job, she is a "What Not to Wear" episode waiting to happen, a candidate for an extreme makeover.

"Who is that sad little person? Are we doing a before-and-after piece I don't know about?" Nigel (Stanley Tucci) asks, upon spotting Andy in the publication's hallowed halls.

Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), the first lady of fashion and editor of Runway, realizes Andy is unlike any of her usual applicants. "You don't read Runway. Before today, you'd never heard of me." Andy has no style or sense of fashion, she says, and when Andy tries to protest, she adds, "No, that wasn't a question."

But Miranda hires Andy anyway to be her second assistant, joining first assistant and acolyte Emily (Emily Blunt) in being at Miranda's professional and personal beck and call at all hours. Miranda rattles off a half-dozen orders at a time, makes impossible demands -- a plane ride home during a hurricane, for example -- and inspires fear in underlings and designers alike.

She is the boss from hell in the comedy "The Devil Wears Prada," based on the Lauren Weisberger best seller. It was generally considered a thinly veiled version of her own experience as an assistant to legendary Vogue editor Anna Wintour, and the novel is much more scathing than the movie, a chick flick if there ever was one.

Andy, an aspiring journalist, bemoans her no-win situation. Do something right, and it's unacknowledged; do something wrong, and Miranda is vicious.

She decides to adopt the couture costume, raiding the magazine's samples stash with Nigel and coming away with a Nancy Gonzalez handbag, Chanel boots, Jimmy Choos and other treasures. She insists she's the same Andy, just with better clothes, but her boyfriend (Adrian Grenier from "Entourage") and pals wonder if she's become a glamazon or one of the "Clackers," the anorexic girls whose stiletto heels clatter on the marble floor.

"The Devil Wears Prada," both a film and a fast-moving fashion show, charts Andy's passage from wide-eyed grad to a working girl who thinks she's just biding her time but who may have gone over to the dark side. Or at least the shadowy side.

Streep, with her hair a dramatic white, plays Miranda as an ice queen who can telegraph disapproval by pursing her lips. She is demanding, imperious and opinionated, and she lets her defenses down only once, in a wonderfully telling scene in which she wears no makeup, belted designer dresses, furs, shoes or even earrings. Streep plays it beautifully, as you would expect.

Hathaway undergoes yet another transformation, just as she did in "The Princess Diaries," in which she played a socially awkward teen who learns she's a real-life princess. The movie, however, is nearly stolen by Blunt as the assistant who quivers like a wet poodle at the desire to anticipate Miranda's every wish, and by Tucci. He goes from catty -- calling size 6 the new 14 (the obsession with weight is as realistic as it is distressing) -- to endearing.

The book, naturally, gives a much greater sense of the tyranny of Miranda and sheer grind of working for her. Her Starbucks demands alone, and how Andy picks up lattes for her boss and orders some for homeless people and expenses them, make it worth the read.

One thing I disliked about the novel, however, was its abrupt ending. Problem solved and compounded here, though, with a movie that ends and then ends and then ends and, finally, ends, softening Andy and even Miranda in the process.

Hell is still frozen over, but it thaws, just the tiniest bit.