WCXX

"Your place is homey!" fresh-off-the-plane Jasmine says to her sister, meaning this as a euphemism for shabby and cramped. It's her idea, and possibly Allen's, of cut-rent squalor, even though it perhaps strikes us as something closer to working-class chic. Jasmine claims to be flat broke, after her shady ex-husband (Alec Baldwin, perfect) got done for tax evasion and fraud – but it hasn't stopped her flying first class or hanging on to a full set of Louis Vuitton luggage, in permanent denial of what real penury might entail.

Denial (let's resist the Egypt joke) is Jasmine's default state. As we find in the flashbacks, she constantly looked the other way, not only when it came to Baldwin's business affairs, but his extramarital ones, too.

After falling off this gilded perch, all her neuroses have suddenly come home to roost – now she's a Xanax-popping, Stoli Martini-downing calamity waiting to happen.

Blanchett's best acting has always had a tragicomic ripeness, a nostril-flaring love of melodrama. Jasmine might be closest to her hoodwinked heiress, Meredith Logue, from The Talented Mr Ripley, only with grander delusions and lower depths to plumb. When this wretched fool, half-cut and sweat-stained, starts talking to herself on the street, Blanchett dives into full-on dementia – it's even a bit much – but her feel for the character's blinkered entitlement is ruthlessly on the money, and often hilarious.

Allen's ambitions with this taut, tart character study might not be stratospheric, but they're at least moderate-to-high, and his degree of success is exciting. The film signposts its debt to Tennessee Williams by giving Ginger – warmly and winningly sketched by Hawkins – a succession of brutish boyfriends, with a particularly credible turn from Andrew Dice Clay as her rough lump of an ex.

Still, it's not Allen's purpose to lead us into A Streetcar Named Desire's uncanny emotional vortex. His intent's more satirical. It's playing a paradoxical game with haves and have nots, detailing how Jasmine, for all her cushion of wealth, lacks everything that matters – love, real security, inner peace. There was a time – maybe around Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) – when Allen might have wrung this idea painfully from the heart, and ripped out our insides. Instead, he puts us through a more knowing, witty, elegant kind of wringer.

In Blanchett's hands, Jasmine may not strike you as wholly recognisable flesh and blood. Let's call her a supremely enjoyable archetype, a richly detailed movie character, and a very likely fast-track to Best Actress glory. She's served up on a plate: it could hardly be piled much higher.