In Blue Valentine, Michelle Williams’s heart-shaped face is the white-chocolate coating over a shrivelled raisin beneath. “Shrivelled” is a keyword; her Cindy was a plump, hearty grape before the cruelly specular light of life braised her. “Cruel” is key, too; the film can be reduced to its quicksilver alternations between courtship and cruel realities, with short-lived glints of happiness that stick out like jigsaw pieces jammed into the wrong puzzle. Dean (Ryan Gosling), the childlike father of her daughter (Faith Wladyka), and quite obviously from the onset, soon to be her ex-husband, would have never made proper marriage material for Cindy—or, probably, for anyone else. Not that he’s a bad guy. Quite the opposite. But he’s a literary trope—the penniless drifter—and he seems like a holdover from an earlier era; living in Brooklyn, he’s what well-heeled hipsters want to be but aren’t.

Cindy is not a hipster. She has the incontrovertible beauty of a cheerleader, and the brains of someone working to make the grade for med school; but she has a special susceptibility to dingalings like Dean who have neither the aptitude nor the desire to conform. This susceptibility, which is like a little trap door inside of her from which the ultimate bleakness of the universe seeps in, crystallizes exquisitely when she denudes Dean’s preconceptions with a black joke that I’d fain call my own. It doesn’t take a long leap of the imagination to guess why their banns were so hastily posted; but their being mismatched isn’t their whole tragedy. The movie’s deep, sublime, and dreary pain spouts from the couple’s reluctant sense of their own impermanence from the get-go—that, no matter what they do, no matter how hard they try, they can’t will the strings between their hearts to tie into a permanent knot.

What makes this truth tragic here—rather than comedic, as it was in Annie Hall—is the way that the director, Derek Cianfrance (who wrote the script with Cami Delavigne and Joey Curtis) ingeniously juxtaposes the couple’s hopeful first steps with its stumbles into dissolution. It’s a confusing device at first, but, for anyone who has ever been part of a failed relationship—there must be a few of you out there—it’s a very satisfying one; it provides an answer to the oft-asked “Where did we go wrong?” (The answer is simple, logistically; emotionally, it’s infinitely fraught with complications.) At times, the cramped style is like mumblecore with the volume cranked up, and there’s a climactic scene that may not have been scripted, per se, but comes off as too intrusive and dramatically convenient. Although Williams, on the receiving end, remains in character (she’s pitch-perfect—translucent), Gosling loses too much of his cool, boiling over like the undirected actors in A Woman Under the Influence.

Mostly, though, the back-and-forth between the leads feels spot-on, even if their joyless world seems marred by falsities. Maybe it’s Dean’s inexplicable adoption of white-trash attire; and that his hair recedes more quickly than the peroxide in his wife’s. (Are we to, in Jamie Foxx’s words, “blame it on the alcohol”?) Or maybe it’s Cindy’s family, which seems as indefinably linked to some industrial-age past as her husband does. Or maybe—and I say this without remorse for the dozens of times I’ve listened to Veckatimest while my windows were down and the speed limit was too slow to forbear—it’s the Grizzly Bear music, which imparts a burning spirituality that’s too hot for the ashes of a whimsical courtship and kicked romance. But this all seems like quibbling; Cianfrance winds up his actors but doesn’t get in their way. Blue Valentine is for one to sit back, admire, and commiserate with.