The writer-director James Gray's last movie, We Own the Night, had the most visually stunning car chase scene in some thirty years, and that's an achievement that a lot of moviemakers would be happy to retire on. But though Gray knows his way around an action scene, his first three features are all stories about men involved in crime that can't be easily shoehorned as genre movies. His latest, Two Lovers (which Nick Schager reviewed earlier this week), might at first glance seem to be a change of pace, because the violence is all emotional. But on a deeper level, the movie, in which Gray returns to the Brighton Beach area of his feature debut Little Odessa and reunites with the star of The Yards and We Own the Night, Joaquin Phoenix, is of a piece with his earlier work, all family dramas about people in extreme situations torn apart by mixed feelings and divided loyalties.

How did you come around to wanting to tell this story?

It was really a combination of three different things that sort of inspired the movie. I was at a party with Gwynneth Paltrow, and she said to me, "Y'know, I'm quitting acting, and I'm just gonna raise my kids." And I said, "That's terrible, because you have a real gift, and now you're not going to use it." And she said, "Well, what do you care? We were never gonna work together, you make movies about guys who shoot guns off all the time." Which sucked.

And it wasn't how you saw yourself?

Well, I kinda did, but at the same time, you don't want people thinking that's all you can do.

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As a director, James Gray is an old-school anachronism, not only because of his fondness for straightforward genre mechanisms but, just as crucially, for his dedication to melodramatic sincerity. That quality takes center-screen in Two Lovers, a romance whose earnestness borders on the creaky yet has a way of creeping under one’s skin, crowding out any minor concerns about the stolidity of its love-triangle narrative. As in The Yards and We Own the Night, Gray’s latest benefits from an impeccable sense of place, in this case modern-day Brooklyn, whose windy chill, intimacy and ethnic character all lend warm, comfortable authenticity to the tale of Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix), the son of a Jewish dry cleaner back living with his parents after having been left by his fiancé and committed, post-suicide attempt, to a mental hospital. Leonard’s downcast eyes and penchant for mumbled monosyllabic utterances express a damaged soul but Phoenix, acutely in tune with Gray’s depiction of his milieu (in this, his third collaboration with the director), refuses to reduce his indecisive protagonist to simply the walking wounded. Playfulness flirting around the corners of his eyes and mouth, and determination lurking underneath his surface hesitancy, Leonard is a man hurt but not hopeless, his spirit – as evidenced by a supremely evocative opening wannabe-fatal dive off a pier – scarred but not irrevocably so.

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