It’s an acquired taste, usually through Monty Python, but there is something irresistible about an English upper-class twit twitching with timidity and mortification. John Cleese, in “A Fish Called Wanda,” was a modern master of the genre. Hugh Grant made it cute.

Bill Nighy pares back to a more painful, bittersweet note in the HBO movie “The Girl in the CafĂ©” tonight. Mr. Nighy, who so memorably played the roguish, aging rocker in “Love, Actually,” dons a Savile Row suit and bashful self-effacement for his part as Lawrence, a lonely civil servant who falls for a mysterious young woman in a London coffee shop near his office.

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No doubt about it: “The Girl in the Cafe” is the best romantic comedy set at a G-8 summit you’re ever likely to see. But it’s more than that. Besides packing a weighty message — significant reduction in global poverty and infant mortality is now within the grasp of world leaders — this lovely film can hold its own against any love story as it depicts a mismatched couple struggling to connect.

The winsome, enigmatic girl, Gina, is played by Scottish actress Kelly Macdonald, and makes an ideally unexpected soul mate for Lawrence, the lonely, middle-aged British bureaucrat played to perfection by Bill Nighy (”Love Actually” and the Peabody Award-winning BBC miniseries “State of Play”).

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You probably can count on one hand (or maybe one finger) the number of romantic dramas that also advocate the eradication of extreme poverty worldwide and push for lower rates of childhood mortality.

The reason more don’t attempt such disparate goals, as “The Girl in the Cafe” demonstrates, is that it isn’t easy to blend deadly serious and depressing world crises with whimsical love stories.

That didn’t stop writer Richard Curtis from trying and nearly pulling it off. In the end, though, his attempt to educate his audience about the desperate lives of Third World residents saps too much of the joy from this story about two shy people awkwardly, and occasionally comically, reaching out to one another.

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I start by lobbing Kelly Macdonald a few gentle under-arm questions about life with her husband, Dougie Payne, the bassist with Travis. Have you ever wanted to collaborate with Dougie, I venture hesitantly?”I hate to say it, but no,” comes the apologetic answer. Do you lead the rock’n'roll lifestyle? “No, no, no,” she virtually screams at me. Do you ever go out on the road with Travis? The brisk response: “How many nos can you get in your notebook?”

The actress says all this, I hasten to add, with a huge smile on her face. She is delightful company - full of girlish, conspiratorial chuckling - but she’ll never make a bona fide rock chick. She’d be even less use as a diva; in fact, she’d be unceremoniously ejected by the bouncers if she ever tried to gain entry to the prima donna club. She would never convince as a flouncing, serial tantrum-thrower, asking for silken sheets to be flown in from Egypt or for kittens to play with in her dressing-room. Kelly Macdonald is the most unstarry of stars.

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Trainspotting actress Kelly MacDonald played a tampon container in a film when she was a struggling unknown actress.

MacDonald, who plays Bill Nighy’s love interest in Richard Curtis’ G8 Summit themed TV movie, The Girl in the CafĂ© , had her fair share of unglamorous roles before getting finding fame alongside Ewan McGregor in the drug-themed Scottish drama in 1996.

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