'Crazy' and thoughtful

You don’t have to have endured a long-distance relationshipto appreciate “Like Crazy,” but if you have, you’ll have no trouble identifyingwith the yearning, the worrying and the loneliness that consume Jacob (AntonYelchin) and Anna (Felicity Jones), a couple separated — in a bitterly ironictwist of fate — by their desire to stay together.

Typically, many affairs that start on campus burn out bygraduation day. “Crazy” is concerned with happens when a romance continuesbeyond what should have been its expiration date.

Shot on digital video and crisply edited, the drama focuseson the emotional evolution of two people trying to maintain their feelings foreach other as outside forces try to break that bond. While the no-nonsensescreenplay by Ben York Jones and director Drake Doremus doesn’t exactlyreinvent screen romance as we know it, it does hit on a number of solid pointsabout the nature of passion. By any standards, it's far more thought-provoking and potent than "Breaking Dawn, Part One."

It doesn’t take much more than a couple of shy smiles and a noteon a car windshield to bring together Anna, a journalism student from Britain, andJacob, a classmate with a passion for furniture design. Doremus puts his faithin Jones and Yelchin to demonstrate how quickly affection can grow. The stars (whoimprovised much of their own dialogue) don’t let him down.

The lavender-voiced Jones is particularly wonderful as sheillustrates how Anna’s intelligence and ambition are sometimes undercut by herimpulsiveness. Faced with the painful prospect of enduring a few weeks awayfrom Jacob, she makes the bold decision not to go home to London after herstudent visa expires. She’s a woman in love, which she mistakenly believesgives her permission to write her own rules.

“We can stay in bed all summer!” she bubbles to Jacob — and,in one of the film’s most charming sequences, a rapid-fire montage shows themdoing exactly that.

What Anna and Jacob don’t yet know is that connections andcommitments that seem completely logical and natural when you’re in college canbe devilishly tricky to maintain in post-graduate life, as new jobs and newfriends slip into the picture. Jacob gives Anna a silver bracelet inscribedwith the word “patience”: At the time, neither of them realizes how much ofthat they are going to need.

While instant-messaging and Skype may make separation a bitless grueling (and they’re certainly more immediate and less expensive thansending letters or making overseas phone calls, as earlier generations had todo), they aren’t particularly terrific substitutes for hugs and kisses.

The sturdy supporting cast includes Jennifer Lawrence asJacob’s co-worker, who’d like to be more than merely a gal pal, Alex Kingstonand Oliver Muirhead as Anna’s understanding parents and Charlie Bewley as the Londonlad determined to prove he’s Anna’s Mr. Right.

“Like Crazy” ends with a powerful moment of intimacy that canbe read at least a couple of different ways. Doremus firmly believes that ifsomeone is truly special to you, out of sight doesn’t necessarily mean out ofmind. Still, the movie asks, at what point should you stop following your heartand start listening to reason?