Soaring with wonder, feeling and imagination, “Finding Neverland” is about a troubled artist who befriends a troubled family, and in a blizzard of pixie-dust and make-believe, finally finds his muse.

As “Peter Pan” playwright J.M. Barrie, Johnny Depp (“Ed Wood”) delivers another masterful performance, this one characterized by subtle dramatic redirections: expectancy, watchfulness, astonishment. A loner by nature — he even plays chess by himself — Barrie has the look of a painter forever peering around the side of his canvas, looking for detail,
inspiration, anything to set his creative wheels in motion.

When we first meet Barrie, the wheels have all but ground to a stop.

Locked in a loveless marriage with a cold- mannered socialite (Radha Mitchell from “Pitch Black”), Barrie (already a household name in turn-of-the-century England) has just seen his latest play fizzle, much to his disappointment and that of his American producer, Charles Frohman (Dustin Hoffman). A chance meeting in a London park leads Barrie to strike up a friendship with the Davies family: the widow Sylvia Llewelyn Davies (Kate Winslet from “Titanic”) and her four sons, in whom Barrie sees some of the boyish brio that has gone missing from his own life and work.

Barrie becomes particularly close to Peter Davies, the somber second-to- youngest son whom the older man believes is denying himself a childhood in the vain hope that loss — in this case, the loss of a father — is felt less intensely as an adult. As Peter, 12-year- old actor Freddie Highmore is show- stopping, giving perhaps the most precocious performance for an actor his age since Haley Joel Osment in “The Sixth Sense.”

Though some of the facts are screwy — the children, in fact, weren't fatherless; Sylvia didn't lose her husband until after Barrie met the family — “Finding Neverland” is awash in tender, revealing moments.

Charmingly, if fancifully, director Marc Forster (“Monster's Ball”) ticks off the various real-world encounters that will become the genesis for “Peter Pan.” Early on, a game of cowboys and Indians foreshadows Barrie's creation of the Lost Boys. Later, a stern rebuke from the boy's grandmother (Julie Christie) yields an early prototype for Captain Hook.

Though profoundly moving in places, “Finding Neverland” stretches for a sense of magical wonder that has a crowding effect on the more mundane story elements. For instance, Forster and first-time screenwriter David Magee never fully engage the insinuations of scandal (one character hints at something unsavory between Barrie and the Davies) or the issue of Barrie's marriage. If he was so keen on kids, why didn't he have any of his own? Was his wife incapable? Was he incapable? Forster — whose “Monster's Ball” left no detail to chance — drops hints here and there, but leaves the rest to our imagination.