YOU CAN COUNT ON ONE HAND the number of films in recent memory to treat love as a living energy, as the one force that, despite all efforts to the contrary, can never truly be a commercial product in a commercial world. Waking the Dead, a new film by Keith Gordon based on Scott Spencer’s novel, is a tear-stained romance suffused with a real love that is equal parts vital devotion and a kind of pained questioning. Billy Crudup and Jennifer Connelly play lovers in scenes calmly layered with stares, honest silences, and the rewards of listening to another human being.

“I love when the actors aren’t saying anything,” admits Gordon, who, unlike the carefully guarded oddballs he played all those years ago in Dressed to Kill and Christine, is openly accessible. “In fact, we even did such dorky techniques in rehearsal a couple of times as doing scenes without words, which is sort of Acting 101. I’d say, ‘Okay, now let’s do the exact same scene, but you can’t say anything and you have to express all the same ideas.’ And we would sometimes do that just to get into that place where it got back to being about what the eyes said, and what the body language said, and all that stuff.”

His actors obviously responded well to the approach. Waking the Dead has Crudup playing Fielding Pierce, a young, charismatic would-be politician who falls for Connelly’s Sarah Williams, an assured Catholic girl who’s devoted to leftist causes. Connelly’s unforced confidence here is a revelation after years of veritable bimbo roles, and her alluringly casual directness complements the gorgeous Crudup’s devastatingly focused intensity. Jumping back and forth from the idealistic early ’70s to the morally corrupt early ’80s, the story patiently unfolds Fielding’s “haunting” and personal journey after Sarah is apparently killed in a terrorist bombing while accompanying a pair of Chilean rebels.

“The biggest thing was to create enough trust and safety that they as young actors could go to some very raw, emotional places,” says Gordon, having led other such performers to fine work in films like his lovely, understated anti-war drama, A Midnight Clear. “I was really asking both of them to be very naked — not as much physically, but emotionally and spiritually. Especially for a young male. I mean, you know, even if you’re a young male actor, you’re still young and male and have grown up in this society. And to ask someone to be that raw and exposed is very scary.”

The well-acted supporting characters (including Tumbleweeds‘ Janet McTeer as Fielding’s supportive sister) are not handled as gracefully as the leads, and an occasional reliance on music-laden montage feels too “pop” for a film otherwise so lushly meditative, yet the polished rawness of Waking the Dead creeps up on you. Gordon’s quietly impassioned handling of the material (as both adapter and director) never dresses up the lovers’ differences as a gimmick, but sees them as a challenging source of mutual redemption. Crudup, in particular, responds with a quite stunning performance of heartbreaking vulnerability. The film takes its time — you have to stick with it for its rewards — and so does Crudup, who slowly, convincingly reaches his nirvana. A couple of scenes (a phone call between Fielding and Sarah, and a post-election emotional breakdown in a restaurant) resonate with an almost unbearable longing. The phone call, in which Fielding collapses in anguished self-doubt and tells a long-lost Sarah, “I don’t think you’re gonna like me,” is one of many scenes that were ad-libbed.

“They transcended anything that I could have put on a piece of paper, because it was so real — they were lost,” Gordon says, still astonished by the results. “But where their bravery was so huge was that rather than getting lost and going, ‘Uh, can we cut? I don’t know where I’m going,’ they just went, and that’s just a gift…. There are a lot of actors who never would have had the confidence, intelligence, and focus that both of them had to let jumping into the unknown become something positive.”

The unknown here builds with an uncommon lyricism, its verses part of a larger song that, with rare accomplishment, achieves an understanding that love is not so much a transformation as it is the method by which we become the person we were meant to be.