Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams in “Blue Valentine.” Credit Davi Russo/Weinstein Company

There is a song about the thin line between love and hate, but most movies pick a side and stay on it. “Blue Valentine,” a long-gestating project directed by Derek Cianfrance, examines a young couple falling in and out of love, and makes of that thin line a vast and blurry no man’s land. Speaking of music, Leonard Cohen has a song about being danced to the end of love, but Mr. Cianfrance’s characters, Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams), stumble and crawl in that direction, having forgotten the nimble, playful steps they once knew.

Mr. Cianfrance, who wrote the screenplay with Joey Curtis and Cami Delavigne, begins close to the bitter finale of Cindy and Dean’s relationship, skips back to the winsome beginning, and toggles back and forth between those points, leaving the middle to the audience’s imagination.

When we first see them, this still-young couple is at the start of another day of weary struggle. Dean is a house painter, Cindy is a nurse, and they share their modest house in Pennsylvania with their 6-year-old daughter, Frankie (Faith Wladyka), and a dog whose disappearance is a harbinger of things to come.

But as one narrative strand unravels, another knits together. Ms. Williams and Mr. Gosling, so puffy and tired at first glance, reappear in the blink of an eye as younger, trimmer and more energetic versions of themselves. Six years have been rolled back — the actors had barely a month to accomplish their startling physical transformations — and Dean, working for a Brooklyn moving company, is courting Cindy, whom he first encounters at the assisted-living residence where she visits her beloved grandmother. She has a jerk for a boyfriend (Mike Vogel), another one for a father (John Doman), and a steadfast determination to finish college and go on to medical school.

Dean, with no visible roots or connections, has dreamier, more romantic ambitions. He wants to love a woman the way guys say they do in those great old songs: suddenly, completely and forever.

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In the early days, Dean’s willingness to do anything for Cindy strikes her, and us, as charming and brave. He will play the ukulele on a dark street, endure a dinner-table third degree and a savage beating, save what money he can, and commit to a future of accidental but nonetheless devoted fatherhood. But the very qualities that seemed so appealing to Cindy at first are nearly intolerable six years later. She wants him to do something with his life, to show some drive or initiative, but all he wants is to be with her and Frankie. He once looked like the nicest guy she had ever met, and now he seems like the weakest.

In “Blue Valentine” Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams find what once was so alluring in their relationship is no longer so. Credit Davi Russo/Weinstein Company

He also drinks and whines, while she works herself to exhaustion and rarely smiles. The sexual spark that he tries to recapture with a night away at a cheesy “fantasy” resort motel has turned soggy. What went wrong?

In suggesting an answer to this question, Mr. Cianfrance supplies both too much information and too little. Mr. Gosling is convincing as the run-down, desperate, older Dean, and maybe a bit less so as the younger version, but in any case it is hard to intuit what connects one to the other. The drinking and the violent temper he displays in one overwrought climactic scene seem to come from nowhere, to be willed into being by the director’s narrative conceit rather than arising organically from the character’s life.

Ms. Williams is, as ever, heartbreakingly precise in every scene, but if Mr. Gosling’s character is burdened with too little story, hers is saddled with too much. Mr. Cianfrance is capable of drawing nuances of feeling from his actors, but he does not trust the story enough to let it move according to any internal emotional logic. Instead, a lot of pretty obvious and not always convincing stuff needs to happen. Cindy’s boyfriend and father need to be made into caricatures of male insensitivity, and narrative bombs need to be carefully lighted and detonated, as if ordinary love were not explosive enough.

Viewed from a certain, admittedly uncharitable, angle, “Blue Valentine” looks like a grim, dirty-realist, festival-circuit version of (and sequel to) “Knocked Up.” Like “Biutiful,” another unsparingly harsh movie that opens on Wednesday, it has a naturalism that is almost entirely a matter of visual texture and social milieu. The grainy, washed-out colors of the breakup phase, which contrast with the somewhat brighter palette of the courtship sections, create an illusion of immediacy and rawness that is underlined by the scruffy Keystone State locations. And Ms. Williams and Mr. Gosling are exemplars of New Method sincerity, able to be fully and achingly present every moment on screen together.

But Cindy and Dean remain, for all their sustained agony and flickering joy, something less than completely realized human beings. Mr. Cianfrance’s ingenious chronological gimmick, coupled with his anxious, clumsy plotting, leaves them without enough oxygen to burst into breathing, loving life. A recent German film called “Everyone Else,” directed by Maren Ade (and released in the United States this year), shows, with minimal embellishment and absolute honesty, how potentially fatal fissures begin to develop within a young couple’s relationship. “Blue Valentine” mystifies the emotional logic that Ms. Ade presents with bracing clarity and leaves its audience, along with poor Cindy and Dean, in a muddle of hurt feelings and vague disappointments.

“Blue Valentine” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has swearing, smoking and sex — some hot, some sad.


Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan.

Directed by Derek Cianfrance; written by Mr. Cianfrance, Joey Curtis and Cami Delavigne; director of photography, Andrij Parekh; edited by Jim Helton and Ron Patane; music by Grizzly Bear; production design by Inbal Weinberg; costumes by Erin Benach; produced by Jamie Patricof, Lynette Howell and Alex Orlovsky; released by the Weinstein Company. At the Angelika Film Center, Mercer and Houston Streets, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes.

WITH: Ryan Gosling (Dean), Michelle Williams (Cindy), Faith Wladyka (Frankie), Mike Vogel (Bobby) and John Doman (Jerry).

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