Available on DVD: “Like Crazy”

The actors keep their clothes on, but everything else is naked in Like Crazy, a romantic drama that makes other romantic films look obvious and calculated in comparison. The emotions are raw. The technique is spare — very little music, long shots, long scenes. And the characters are left unprotected by the filmmaker, who doesn’t worry too much about what we’ll think of them. He lets them go down some dark roads.

Sometimes you need to see something in order to realize what you haven’t been seeing onscreen, and what we haven’t been seeing is young love as it really tends to happen. In Like Crazy, people don’t "meet cute," they just meet. Their connection is rare, and yet comes with a feeling like this is the easiest thing in the world. And although their joy and excitement are all-consuming, the relationship takes place against the real-life tensions of being in one’s early 20s, a time of life that often seems enviable in retrospect but in practice can be stressful: It’s all well and good to have your whole life ahead of you, but what happens if you choose the wrong life and get stuck with it?

The first hint of something special about Like Crazy comes in the first 20 minutes, in which Anna (Felicity Jones) and Jacob (Anton Yelchin), two college seniors in Los Angeles, go on a date and soon become inseparable. In these minutes, writer-director Drake Doremus does something quite skillful, so skillful that you might not notice it. He commands an audience’s complete attention, even though, at this point, there is no plot question hovering in the air, no power imbalance in need of resolution; there is really nothing going on but the spectacle of two nice, intelligent people becoming increasingly crazy about each other.

In these minutes, Doremus holds us by making us believe, completely, in the reality and specialness of this bond. Anna is English, hyper-verbal, crisp and starched, and yet capable of such demonstrations of affection that you start to wonder if any woman in history has ever loved anybody more than she loves this guy. And Jacob is American, a bit slower, sloppier and simpler, but with something behind the eyes that lets you know that he’s very present and nobody’s fool.

In life, the stress inherent in happiness is our knowledge that it can end. Doremus infuses these early scenes with that underlying ache, even before we know that Anna’s student visa is running out and that she’ll have to go home to London for a whole summer before she can return. When she decides to violate the visa and spend the summer in bed with Jacob, it’s the sort of moment that will make everyone over 30 feel very wise yet very old: No, young lady. You must not do this. Oh no, no …

The "like crazy" of the title refers to missing someone like crazy, which is what these two people have to go through when immigration troubles keep them apart. The vast bulk of Like Crazy deals with the difficulties of maintaining a relationship across 5,000 miles, and the movie’s take is anything but flowery. There is the inevitable inner questioning — "Do I really need this person, is it worth it?" There are arguments and betrayals. The situation is more than hard; it’s damaging.

Which leads me to what is most impressive about Like Crazy, even beyond the shrewd plotting that consistently skips over unnecessary detail, and the two lovely, sharp performances, and the tender conveying of exquisitely painful moments, as when Anna rides home alone on the London subway, having dropped Jacob off at the airport. Like Crazy is about the real destructiveness of separation, about how two people change, hurt each other and even sully what’s most precious within themselves. Yet with this comes the sophisticated suggestion that, in the end, it is precisely this shared history, including the betrayals, that may keep them together.

To that end, Like Crazy not only depicts the moment of initial connection but also the deeper and more complicated thing that happens way down the line. That’s when two people look at each other and realize, "This person is my person. Somehow this has happened, and there is no turning back."