There are moments in “Like Crazy” when you want to shout warnings at the screen, horror-movie style: Don’t return that drunken late-night text! Don’t violate your visa just because he gave you a pretty bracelet!
This ethereal indie romance, riveting and frustrating, chronicles the trajectory of a young romance. It’s sort of like last year’s “Blue Valentine” on Prozac — the giddy highs and the despairing lows are muted, and a well-known side effect of that antidepressant pops up, too: Palpable lust is all but nonexistent.
Call me shallow, but part of what makes a dizzying romance between two adults so intoxicating is the sex. Of which there is none between the two stars of this movie.
Felicity Jones’ Anna and Anton Yelchin’s Jacob meet at college in LA when she boldly leaves a poetry-laden note on his car. Their pleasantly nervous first date ends not in a makeout session but with a lingering gaze through the glass door of her dorm, setting the stage for a relationship that will spend a lot of time bifurcated by various things.
After British citizen Anna overstays her student visa to spend a blissful post-college summer with Jacob, she’s nabbed the next time she tries to enter the country and is promptly turned back to the UK.
There, she pursues a job as a magazine writer, while he stays and gets his furniture-making business under way. (The title refers to the inscription on a chair he makes for her). Phone calls grow fewer and farther between. “Let me know when it’s good for you to talk,” Jacob says weakly on voice mail, while Anna’s out drinking with new friends.
Anna gets just tipsy enough for a tearful call pleading with Jacob to visit her in London, where they’ll be reunited but things will feel slightly off, absent that indefinable buzz they had back in school.
What’s both genius and maddening about “Like Crazy” is director Drake Doremus’ believable depiction of the breathless pace of early adult relationships, and the way that clinging to the idea of One True Love can morph from a vital life force into a hopeless energy suck.
When Anna and Jacob separate again, they find other partners: he, a sweetly adoring co-worker, Sam (Jennifer Lawrence), and she, her straight-arrow neighbor Simon (Charlie Bewley). Both relationships seem feasible, even healthy (these couples actually do have sex), but for those sneaky 3 a.m. iPhone text messages from the other: “Hi.” “I miss you.”
It’s so romantic! And self-destructive!
“Like Crazy” is shot as structured improv, akin to Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise”/“Before Sunset” films. Yelchin and Jones, both smart and lively actors, turn in very respectable performances, but lack the sparky intellectual and romantic connection of Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy.
We get that Anna and Jacob care for each other, but the foundation for their devotion often feels insubstantial if not imaginary. Sharing an appreciation for Paul Simon’s “Graceland” may not, in the end, be the basis for everlasting love — but that won’t stop them from trying.