As our local friend Amy is a tad over nine months pregnant, we're not currently making dinner plans ahead of time with her. That said, when her husband called us up and asked us to join the two of them in five hours to see a documentary movie, we said "Of course!". The documentary, Wordplay, has a lovely title, but as for its subject – crossword puzzles – well, let’s just say that we love Steve and Amy’s company very much.

I do have positive crossword-puzzle memories, mind you. When it’s dark and my energy levels start to peak, I often like to walk down Tate Street and wander among the campus buildings. Sometimes I’ll stop midway at a convenience store – no, not the College Mart, the one a few doors down owned by the nice Thai woman – and buy a Little Debbie snack cake or something, those being ridiculously cheap and not, I would assert, ridiculously bad. Now and then the Thai woman and her daughter will be doing a crossword puzzle, and they’ll have me stay awhile and help them with tricky clues; it’s pleasant.

Or sometimes I visit my in-laws, and it’s Sunday morning. We’re sitting around the table with the painful half-awake awareness that they are nice people with many interests and I am a nice person with many interests and yet somehow our sets of interests do not overlap AT ALL except for issues of immigration and race which we’d really, really better not talk about. I’ll flip through their New York Times and find the Sunday crossword, which I now know is their hardest of the week. For ten or fifteen minutes I’ll look over the clues, fill in four or five blanks, and life is a little easier.

None of this, however, is the same as me thinking crosswords are interesting. It would have taken a pretty amazing movie to make me think _that_. Wordplay is that movie.

Like Spellbound, which spun tension and social insight out of the similarly numbing-seeming topic of spelling bees, Wordplay includes the story of an annual tournament. We meet five of the most likely winners, people who can race through a Monday (easy) Times crossword in two minutes flat, and get to know them as people. They're all smart, charming, and by the nature of their hobby self-effacing.

Ellen Ripstein, for example, finally had won the tournament the prior year after placing in the top five for eight years running. But she still has learned that answering "What did you do this weekend?" with "competing in the national crossword championship" draws blank stares followed by overt changes of subject. When a date seemed to belittle her hobby, she did have the pleasure of countering "and what are _you_ the best in the entire country at?". But it's not about snappy comebacks or kicking butt, not even for Tyler or Trip, two kids barely into their 20s who somehow have absorbed enough cultural detritus to race through all but the hardest puzzles with a pen and nary a pause.

We come to like the five - especially when, at a key moment in the tournament, three of Tyler's competitors go the judges to insist that his score has been undercounted and needs to be raised 25 points. Trip's boyfriend is fun too, smart if a little outshined in one field, admiring how Trip will form instant 14-letter anagrams out of signs passed on road trips. That said, Spellbound’s competitors were fascinating because they’re marginal kids: immigrants and poor people, shy and easily ignored, desperately seizing an unusual route to distinction. Wordplay's champions, with their general knowledge and lightning-quick talent for spotting patterns, tend to make good livings as musicians and computer whizzes. They don't need the tourney for anything, except companionship and fun. So the main focus of Wordplay is on where the fun comes from.

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A lot of it comes from Will Shortz, the longtime editor of the NYT crossword. He edits, and writes or rewrites half the clues for, seven puzzles a week: easiest on Monday, building up to mercilessly tricky on Sunday. Tall and handsome, with a pleasant smile and a non-silly-looking mustache, Shortz did not have to embrace likely financial failure by designing his own college curriculum in the 1970s; but he could, so he did. Fascinated by puzzles of all sorts, he became America's first B.A.-holder in "Enigmatology", and organized the annual crossword tournament for the sheer fun of meeting people as obsessed as he. He dragged the NYT section into the modern era, allowing current events and pop culture to sully the hallowed collection of clues from ancient British royalty.

He also helped encourage the creation of "Theme" puzzles, where each of the longest horizontal words shares a common bond. Then again, so does Merl Reagle, the most-syndicated puzzle constructor in the country. We watch Reagle create his "Wordplay" puzzle from scratch, incorporating answers like "PlayaDelMar" (it has PLAY in it) and "CrossSwords".

But meanwhile, we also meet the Daily Show's Jon Stewart. We cut repeatedly to him trying to solve one of the Sunday puzzles; he trash-talks Shortz, treating each clue as a mano-a-mano test of manhood. Bill Clinton tries to solve the same puzzle, as do the Indigo Girls (who reminisce about the time they first showed up as a puzzle answer). So does Mike Mussina, future Hall of Fame pitcher for the New York Yankees, who can count on his teammates to try and help when he gets stuck on clues. Each talks, with enthusiasm and cute stories, about the small but addictive role of crossword puzzles in their daily lives. It is a charming irony of the movie that Stewart, Clinton, Saliers/Ray, and Mussina represent the normal people of the world, while the slacker at a Florida pinball machine is our voice of the world's elite.

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We see parts of several different hard puzzles flashed on screen, briefly, at different times; we get a couple of seconds to process each clue before the answer is magically filled in. Among these was the moment that won me over most completely: the puzzle designed, freelance, by one Jeremiah Ferrall for the U.S.'s election day, 1996. The middle row was seven blanks, a black space, and the seven-letter word ELECTED. The clue: the two words together were "tomorrow's front page Times headline". Shortz took a lot of angry calls accusing him of being presumptuous: the word CLINTON fit marvelously.

Except so did BOBDOLE, the Republican nominee. 39d, "Black Halloween animal": CAT or BAT. 40d, "French 101 word": LUI or OUI. 41d, "Provider of support, for short": IRA (retirement support) or BRA (a more immediate form). 23d, "Sewing shop purchase": YARN or YARD. 27d, "Short writings": BITS or BIOS. 35d, "Trumpet": BOAST or BLAST. 42d, "Much-debated political inits.": NRA or ERA. Brilliantest thing ever.

Do I need a daily addiction in my life? Not really. Besides, I have no special talent for trivia, and until now I thought that's what crosswords were mostly about.

Instead, they're also about silly double-meaning puns, and arbitrary challenges, and the joy of letting someone clever mess with your head. According to Amazon.com, they're about $11.27 per 1001 puzzles if you or I buy the right compilation. There's nothing to lose except a few hundred hours of your life. And really, were you planning to need those?

Recommended: Yes