Abigail Breslin, left, Steve Carell and Greg Kinnear star in the comedy Little

I had the feeling after watching music-video maestros Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’ first feature, “Little Miss Sunshine,” that if they’d known how well it would play at the Sundance Film Festival, they would have made a better movie.

It’s pretty good as it is. But the screenplay, by first-timer Michael Arndt, needed one or two more spins through the word processor, just to get rid of a few jarringly silly jokes.

That reservation aside, “Little Miss Sunshine” is a charmer, a comedy with drama – or vice versa – about a mildly dysfunctional Albuquerque family that takes an impromptu van trip to southern California for a child’s talent/beauty pageant.

Seems that 7-year-old Olive Hoover (Abigail Breslin) has been elevated to regional winner after another girl’s disqualification, and she’s rarin’ to go.

Yeah, kiddie pageants are a creepy topic, post-JonBenet Ramsey. And it’s impossible not to be reminded of that when the film reaches its big finale – I mean, big, BIG finale – where Olive takes the stage. You’ll have to see it to believe it.

“Little Miss Sunshine” is a road movie framed by an introductory setup dinner at the Hoovers and the climactic beauty contest. Most of the movie takes place on and off Interstate 40, as the family trudges across the Southwest in their wheezing VW bus. The humor, and the pathos, come mostly out of the cross-wired relationships.

Richard Hoover (Greg Kinnear) is a motivational speaker who is simultaneously – and obnoxiously – self-confident and insecure. His father (Alan Arkin) is an incorrigible, heroin-snorting senior who just got booted out of a rest home for pinching his care providers. Dwayne (Paul Dano), a Nietzsche devotee, is in the 10th month of a vow of silence. And Frank (Steve Carell), a gay Proust scholar whose boyfriend ran off with a lesser Proust scholar, is recuperating from a sloppy suicide attempt.

Richard worries that his father is a bad influence, as he sits in the back seat imploring the mute Dwayne to have sex with as many women as he possibly can in his life. Sheryl (Toni Collette) is worried that Richard’s big deal – publication of his nine-step “Refuse to Lose” program – will fall through.

Everyone but Dwayne is worried about Dwayne, and everyone but Frank is worried about Frank.

And each and every one is worried about the van, which loses its clutch shortly after the trip begins, and gets its horn stuck long before they reach their destination. It’s one comic crisis after another.

But the glue that ultimately binds is family love, and it comes out in surprising, effective ways.

The casting is flawless. Kinnear has never been better suited to a role; Richard’s gradual surrender of his ego is sweet and totally convincing. Arkin has the best lines, and delivers them with the timing of a vaudeville pro.

Carell (“The 40-Year-Old Virgin”) shows no ego at all, in a nuanced performance as a lovelorn guy trying to get by on a broken heart, and Breslin, who played Mel Gibson’s daughter in “Signs,” has a cheerfulness about her that suits the crown she’s seeking. Whether Olive is named “Little Miss Sunshine” or not, her act in the talent show may have you doing what the premiere audience was doing in Sundance – dancing in the aisles.