Barbie comes roaring out of the gate with an inventiveness and energy the movie perhaps inevitably can’t sustain. Amid all the hype that has made its release an increasingly rare movie-going occasion, director Greta Gerwig’s film proves an admirably ambitious attempt to ponder where Barbie fits in the 21st century – less than it could be, but pretty close to being what it should be.

Gerwig, who shares script credit with her partner, Noah Baumbach has certainly put together all the right accessories, starting with Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, in a movie whose brightly colored Barbie Land is awash in the kind of details, most of them pink that will likely reward second viewings.

Still, the closest kin would probably be “The Lego Movie,” which similarly took a familiar toy and built a kind of existential crisis around it. While “Barbie” goes the live-action route, there’s an intermittently cartoonish quality to that, and some clunky elements. Will Ferrell’s over-the-top turn as Mattel’s CEO foremost among them, a common link between the two films weighing down, or at least diluting, the clever ones.

The cleverest bits come early, with a Helen Mirren narration and an homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey. But after introducing Barbie Land, occupied by various versions of Barbie and Ken living in anatomically neutered bliss, the film kicks into gear when Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie not to be confused with the more specific variations begins having strange thoughts, which almost literally shake her to her foundation.

At the same time, Gosling’s Ken wrestles with his relevance, and the matter of being little more than Barbie’s appendage, someone who wouldn’t exist without an ampersand. Barbie’s awakening prompts an escape to the Real World, and different epiphanies for both her and Ken regarding its contrast to the idealized, female-centric realm in which they live.