'Beyond the Lights' is a sharply focused winner

While melodramatic in the vein of A Star Is Born, Beyond the Lights is also a wise and open-hearted look at the price of fame upon personal identity.

A romantic drama set amid the music industry (*** out of four; rated PG-13; opens Friday nationwide), it also provides a powerful message to girls and young women not to conform to hypersexualized hip-hop images.

The story opens with 10-year-old Noni (India Jean-Jacques), a shy, bespectacled girl singing a moving a cappella version of Nina Simone's Blackbird at a talent contest in her native London. She gets second place and her ambitious stage mother (Minnie Driver) orders her to toss the trophy.

"Do you want to be a runner-up, or do you want to be a winner?" she asks her young daughter as they get into their beat-up station wagon.

Flash-forward about a dozen years and Noni (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) has chucked the glasses and the natural curly hair. She's a glamorous star, a la Rihanna or Nicki Minaj, singing duets with a famous hip-hop artist and wearing scanty stripper-style gear, gobs of makeup and purple hair extensions.

She wins a Billboard Music Award, and her transformation from quiet biracial girl to exotic recording star seems complete. But the pressures are eating away at Noni. Underneath all the posing, she's deeply unhappy. The celebratory night culminates in a desperate act.

Enter handsome policeman Kaz (Nate Parker), who's assigned as Noni's security detail.

Though it sounds like a cross between The Bodyguard and the plot of a contemporary romance novel, this movie has more substantive ideas on its mind. Somehow, miraculously, the predictable saga skirts cliché.

The soundtrack fuels the movie, but it's essentially about finding one's way and embarking on an authentic life plan.

Noni's life has been masterminded by her mother, but her maternal motivations slowly surface, showing she's not the heartless manipulator she seems to be.

At the same time, Kaz, who sincerely wants to help people, is being pushed by his well-meaning police officer father (Danny Glover) to go into politics.

Both have lofty parental expectations to live up to. Both are pushed to put their careers above all else. And both are ultimately saved by love.

While this could have been an all-too-predictable tale (hampered by a clunky title), the familiar story is buoyed by terrific performances by a pair of talented, charismatic actors. Parker conveys an innate sense of decency and strength as well as sensitivity. Mbatha-Raw projects vulnerability, intelligence and warmth, and is thoroughly believable as a singer.

Both actors are strikingly attractive, and Parker is shown shirtless as often, if not more, than Mbatha-Raw, which offers cinematic ogling parity. However, writer/director Gina Prince-Bythewood has created fully drawn characters that are more than pretty faces and toned bodies. Noni and Kaz have enough depth and dimension for the audience to root enthusiastically for them.

Hollywood churns out romantic comedies, but romantic dramas — unless they're of the sickly-sweet Nicholas Sparks variety — are less numerous.

With its focus on integrity, creativity and identity, Beyond the Lights is a rare intelligent romantic drama.