Emma Thompson a highlight of already high-flying 'Late Night'

“Late Night” - ★ ★ ★ ½

Forget national treasure: Emma Thompson could rent herself out as a national utility. In the alternately sharp-edged and generous-hearted comedy “Late Night,” she is so radiant, so utterly in command of her instruments of voice, body and facial expression that she could light up an entire urban grid with slightest suggestion of a grin.

Then again, Thompson's Katherine Newbury, an acerbic talk-show host facing imminent replacement, is more likely to bare her fangs than turn the world on with her smile. As “Late Night” opens, she fires one of her writers — a new dad — after he has the temerity to ask for a raise.

Katherine lights into him with vinegary disdain, noting that the “good provider” role was used for decades to justify paying men more, and then drawing a tone-deaf analogy between parenthood and drug addiction. The defenestration is crisp, merciless and final.

For pure sang-froid, Katherine gives Meryl Streep's Miranda Priestly a breathtakingly arrogant — and elegant — run for her money. In fact, “Late Night” shares more than a little DNA with “The Devil Wears Prada”: Mindy Kaling, who also wrote the script, plays an aspiring comedy writer named Molly Patel, who through a series of lucky, maybe not entirely believable breaks lands a job on Katherine's all-male writing staff. What ensues is a sparkling, stylish, buoyant duet of mutual mentorship, in which Molly sets out to make Katherine relevant and Katherine teaches her young protégé how to toughen up.

“Late Night” possesses many of the beats one would expect from a mainstream comedy: a bit of slapstick here, some well-placed pop-culture jokes there. But it's at its best and most timely as an attempt to mine comic gold from a moment when professional meritocracy is being re-examined as a bastion of unexamined privilege and boys-club nepotism.

The complacent bros who populate Katherine's writers' room — headed by a monologue writer named Tom (Reid Scott) — live in a post-Harvard Lampoon playpen of self-amused pomposity and entitlement. Now that Molly has invaded that space, they're thrown into an existential crisis that she finds both annoying and hilarious.

While Molly manages the self-serving assumptions of her male colleagues, she also manages Katherine's often cruel imperiousness. Thompson leans into the witchiness with perfectly delivered gimlet-eyed asides and tetchy retorts, while Kaling offsets the vinegar with soft, unforced sweetness. Their chemistry is delectable, though not every joke lands.

Thanks to some tender moments with her husband, played by John Lithgow, Katherine isn't entirely unconvincing when she enters a more lovable second act. It's at this point that “Late Night” becomes a fantastical wish-fulfillment fantasy in which authenticity, transparency and feminist truth-telling win the day. (Wouldn't it be pretty to think so?)

Still, “Late Night,” directed with efficient unfussiness by Nisha Ganatra, turns out to be an enormously pleasing fable about liberating oneself from the need to please. Like all comedians worth their salt, Kaling sets out to kill — but with kindness.

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Starring: Emma Thompson, Mindy Kaling, John Lithgow, Reid Scott

Directed by: Nisha Ganatra

Other: An Amazon Studios release. Rated R for language and sexual situations. 119 minutes