An interesting and recently much studied generalization of the classical Schur class is the class of contractive operator-valued multipliers S(λ) for the reproducing kernel Hilbert spaceThe reproducing kernel space H(K S ) associated with the positive kernel K S (λ, ζ ) = (I − S(λ)S(ζ ) * ) · k d (λ, ζ ) is a natural multivariable generalization of the classical de Branges-Rovnyak canonical model space. A special feature appearing in the multivariable case is that the space H(K S ) in general may not be invariant under the adjoints M * λ j of the multiplication operators M λ j : f (λ) → λ j f (λ) on H(k d ). We show that invariance of H(K S ) under M * λ j for each j = 1, . . . , d is equivalent to the existence of a realization for S(λ) of the form S(λ) = D + C⎦ has adjoint U * which is isometric on a certain natural subspace (U is "weakly coisometric") and has the additional property that the state operators A 1 , . . . , A d pairwise commute; in this case one can take the state space to be the functional-model space H(K S ) and the state operators A 1 , . . . , A d to be given by A j = M * λ j | H(K S ) (a de BrangesRovnyak functional-model realization). We show that this special situation always occurs for the case of inner functions S (where the associated multiplication operator M S is a partial isometry), and that inner multipliers are characterized by the existence of such a realization such that the state operators A 1 , . . . , A d satisfy an additional stability property.