"You’re all so pretty," scowls Mr. A (Malcolm McDowell) to his corps de ballet. "You know how I hate pretty." Prettiness has never been among Robert Altman’s top priorities, either. Thinking back over the other Mr. A’s body of work, it’s hard to think of a moment that could be described as beautiful. Graphic beauty, at least, is a static quality, evaluated by rules adopted from painting (composition, framing, lighting, etc.), where Altman’s ever-moving camera is a constant reminder of the world beyond the borders of the two-dimensional screen. (The transition to digital video does him far less harm than more mise-en-scéne-oriented filmmakers.) So it’s no surprise that, when it comes to filming dance, Altman rejects the proscenium perspective; he wants to move with the dancers, not watch them from afar. They’re filmed head-to-foot, but sometimes just heads, and sometimes just feet.

The Company is the apotheosis of Altman's ensemble style, a near-realization of Richard E. Grant's "no stars" mantra from The Player. Apart from McDowell and Neve Campbell, who trained with the National Ballet School of Canada before injuries ended her dancing career, the film's major roles are filled by dancers with no previous acting experience, drawn from Chicago's Joffrey Ballet. (McDowell's Antonelli is closely modeled on the Joffrey's real-life artistic director, Gerald Arpino.) The movie has little plot as such, and what there is tends (perhaps deliberately) toward cliche, such as the moment where Campbell's Loretta Ryan (known as Ry) gets her big break when the dancer she's understudying injures herself just before a major performance. Altman is accustomed to treating a script (in this case by Pollock's Barbara Turner) as no more than an outline, but in The Company its skeletal structure is never fleshed out; the scenes involving Ry's romance with a cute sous chef (James Franco) stick out like knobbly knees. Some critics, apparently incapable of reading the movie's title, have criticized its lack of plot, but better none than a few sharp fragments. Altman's sense of rhythm, of collective dynamics, obviates any need for character arcs or through-lines.

Indeed, it's the dancers' willingness to sacrifice such personal narratives, their lives outside the company, that so fascinates the film. After Ry and her partner (Domingo Rubio) dance their triumphant duet to "My Funny Valentine" (choreographed by Lar Lubovitch), they seek solitude rather than celebration, as if they don't want to be singled out for praise: She goes home and collapses in tears, while he dances a mesmerizing solo in a darkened studio. Where the dancers have individual stories, they're hinted at rather than shown: It's enough to see a woman, later identified as one of the company's administrators, practicing alone at the barre in the morning, then hurriedly gathering her things as the dancers walk in, or see the helpless look on the face of a young dancer as his mentor (lover? family friend?) engages in an ill-fated pissing contest with Mr. A. Like Altman's camera, the story's focus keeps moving, leaving you to wonder what you might have seen had you stayed behind, or followed this character instead of that.

Rather than looking like "ballet dancers," a term he uses pejoratively, Mr. A tells his dancers that he wants to see them "work," and Altman focuses to an almost fetishistic degree on the physical exertion that goes into dance, the blisters and pulled muscles, dislocated shoulders and snapped Achilles tendons. If Campbell's muscular shoulders seem to get in the way of the "Funny Valentine" choreography (compare with the willowy dancer she's replacing), she seems just right for the closing number, Robert Desrosier's "Blue Snake," a childlike allegory in which brightly costumed dancers (some with balloons tied to their heads) do more bouncing than bourées.

Rather than keep the camera in the audience, Altman puts it on the stage, making it part of the dance, not a neutral observer. Camera placement emphasizes each individual movement, to an extent sacrificing the whole in favor of a better appreciation of its parts (which may be why the studio's strategy to show the film first to dance critics produced largely negative reactions). In the studio, we see a dancer working out the best way to spin in a suspended sling as if we were standing next to her, but when the scene shifts suddenly to the same move in performance, the camera is suddenly far above her looking down, a long lens flattening the distance so she seems to be twirling mere inches above the stage. (Julee Cruise's "Floating" provides the appropriately ethereal backdrop.) We're not seeing it from the audience's perspective, but the dancer's. In his best film since the wonderful and little-seen Jazz '34, Altman reminds us what an astute and empathetic eye he has for the nuances and rhythms of performance, wherever he may find it. He raises spectatorship to the level of collaboration.

Directed by Robert Altman A Sony Pictures Classics release Opens Friday at Ritz Five