MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Ruby’: Intimate, Perceptive Look at Real Life : The film is a low-key story of a young woman striking out on her own and creating a new life in Florida’s Panama City.

Victor Nunez’s “Ruby in Paradise” (at the Westside Pavilion, Beverly Center and Town Center 5 in Encino), an intimate, low-key film as endearing and staunch as its heroine, illuminates the inner being of a seemingly ordinary young woman in the process of creating a life for herself.

This is a warm, perceptive film of everyday life, free of epic tragedy, yet it reveals the courage it can take to strike out on one’s own and to take charge of one’s own destiny. It also marks the screen debut of a radiant young actress, Ashley Judd, who with ease becomes the focal point and sustaining force of the entire film.

Judd’s Ruby Lee Gissing abruptly takes off from her small Tennessee town and heads for Florida’s Panama City, the “Redneck Riviera,” where she proves to be sufficiently self-possessed to land a job as a saleswoman at a sportswear and souvenir store on the beach even though it is the off-season. Right then and there Ruby has commenced a process of self-discovery, and she’s smart enough to know it, carefully recording her thoughts and impressions in her diary. At once open and thoughtful, she will make mistakes but will also be strong and honest enough to learn from them.

The first key people in her new life become her employer (Dorothy Lyman), a chic, longtime divorcee in her 40s, a successful businesswoman, tough-minded but compassionate, and her co-worker (Allison Dean), a sensible, kind young woman aiming for a college degree in business administration.

Crossing her path will be two very different men: first, her employer’s son (Bentley Mitchum), a cocky wheeler-dealer playboy, and later on, a nursery employee (Todd Field), scion of one of the town’s founding families, an intellectual who introduces Ruby to Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson, and whose ecological concerns have led him to despair over the relentless destruction of his native coastal region.

Nunez, whose two previous features, “Gal Young Un” (1980) and “A Flash of Green” (1985), are also set in Florida, has the knack of allowing us to get to know well all these people, plus several others, in the context of daily life. “Ruby in Paradise” is one of the all too few films that acknowledge that most people have to work for a living and that working is therefore central to their lives.

We get an idea of what it is like to toil hard in an immense commercial laundry and what it takes to own and operate a retail store in today’s recessionary times. We also experience what it is like to be out of work and how hard it can be to land a job, any job. In short, “Ruby in Paradise” takes place in a world that Nunez has made refreshingly real, one populated with people of different races and ethnic backgrounds.

Although certainly satisfying, “Ruby in Paradise,” which has a gentle, lyrical beauty, does leave one wondering what it might have been like had Nunez eschewed Ruby’s expressing so many of her thoughts on voice-over as she writes in her diary and instead dared to convey her inner life entirely visually; it might have made the difference between turning out a fine small-scale film and something truly extraordinary.

Nunez is a solid, straightforward filmmaker, but sometimes his script is a tad too literary; although Ruby speaks plainly, her turns of phrase and diction at times are overly polished from someone of her unlettered background.

Also, Field’s Mike McCaslin is so well-played, so likable, despite an understandable pessimism and a forgivably mild case of condescension, that Ruby’s placing him on the back-burner seems contrived to fit the film’s feminist sentiments and doesn’t ring emotionally true. Despite such drawbacks, “Ruby in Paradise” (Times-rated Mature for adult themes and situations) is definitely a winner--and so is Judd, who just happens to be the younger daughter of Naomi and sister of Wynonna.

‘Ruby in Paradise’

Ashley Judd: Ruby Lee Gissing

Todd Field: Mike McCaslin

Bentley Mitchum: Ricky Chambers

Allison Dean: Rochelle Bridges

Dorothy Lyman: Mildred Chambers

An October Films release. Writer-director Victor Nunez. Line producer Keith Crofford. Executive producer Sam Gowan. Cinematographer Alex Vlacos. Costumes Marilyn Wall-Asse. Music Charles Engstrom. Production design John Iacovelli. Art director Burton Rencher. Sound design Pete Winter. Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes.

Times-rated Mature: (adult themes and situations).