Like Crazy

Like Crazy dares you not to like its adorable, fumbling, emotional characters. I’ll take that dare.

Curly-haired naif Jacob (Anton Yelchin, a total doodlebug) is a teacher’s assistant in some kind of new-media survey at a Southern California college where bright-eyed waif Anna (Felicity Jones, even cuter) is an exchange student from England. The movie opens on Anna delivering an overstewed treatise to the class on the state of journalism — the last time director and co-writer Drake Doremus allows her to be memorably articulate. With graduation approaching, crushed-out Anna slips a two-page stalkertation under the wiper blade of Jacob’s car. He dials. She answers. And so, like a couple of Precious Moments figurines that have come horrifyingly to life, Anna and Jacob turn a giggling start-stop conversation over tea into an affair.

No, affair isn’t the right word. That implies sex. Anna and Jacob share something different, something beyond. Their love is idyllic. Their love is the uniting of soul mates on a plane ungreased by human effluvia. Their love is total horseshit.

They bond over a mutual, deeply unlikely affection for Paul Simon’s 25-year-old Graceland. He wants to build furniture for a living. He makes her a chair and burns the movie’s title under its seat. When her student visa runs out, they pledge their love, and he gives her a bracelet engraved Patience. She decides to overstay. He protests for five seconds before agreeing to trade two months of snuggling for a viable adult relationship.

But first, the good times. A montage shows Anna and Jacob’s lost-summer bed-in: overhead shots of the pair in repose, together and separately, she always clothed, he in shirts and not in shirts and sometimes — daringly — in sleeveless shirts. The editing suggests not blissful coupling but sleepwalking. Ripping up a visa isn’t tragic fate, you see — it’s just dumb.

Movie romances motivate their participants with two options: escalation or retreat. Doremus (Ben York Jones co-wrote the screenplay) leans toward the latter while dimly suggesting that immigration policy is this couple’s enemy. But the more these clerks and judges deny Anna re-entry into the United States — thus doing the couple a favor — the more Doremus resolves to build their “love.” The only option for making his sketch almost feature-length: marriage.

Meanwhile, there’s finally some consummation — with others. Jacob’s only onscreen sex is with Jennifer Lawrence and her mascara (who together play a convenience named Sam), in a scene that’s crosscut with Anna’s London shag with equally doomed Simon (Charlie Bewley). Jacob drops a Bill Pullman on poor Sam twice, but Simon fares worse, getting cock-blocked by that bracelet. “Patience” snaps during his and Anna’s assignation, but the spell isn’t broken. No, that’s the signal for Jacob and Anna to give it one more try.

Does it matter that Anna and Jacob are both pretty insufferable? Like Crazy doesn’t do much for “I love you,” but it serves as a fine reminder of three more dangerous words: I and miss and you. Whenever Anna and Jacob reach escape velocity from their fatally stupid relationship, one of them unilaterally deploys that nebulous, weaponized phrase.

Like Crazy fills out a trilogy of recent frustrations begun by (500) Days of Summer and continued by Blue Valentine. Like Summer, Doremus’ movie mistakes winsomeness for enduring appeal, then punishes its characters for showing rare symptoms of actual thought. And like Blue Valentine, Like Crazy means to derive power from its actors’ improvisations. Yelchin and Jones don’t work nearly as hard as Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams — mostly for better — but they have something similar in mind.

In all three movies, what’s obvious to everyone but the characters is that they’re unfit for companionship. This is what happens when the thing that two people have isn’t crazy love but a harebrained like.