Whether you believe that Joaquin Phoenix has really retired from acting to become a rap singer or you suspect it’s an Andy Kaufman-ish prank being staged for a clandestine documentary film, there’s one thing that’s clear from watching Two Lovers, Phoenix’s supposed silver screen swan song: It would be a sad thing to lose such a resourceful and compelling actor just because Hollywood couldn’t fit him into any of its standard round holes. In a role written specifically for him, Phoenix plays Leonard Kraditor, still living in his parents’ Brooklyn apartment a few years after retreating there to convalesce from a callously broken engagement and subsequent suicide attempt. That he’s not ready to deal with the world on his own is clear from an ambivalent attempt to drown himself with which the movie opens. But whether Leonard’s mental state is caused by an inability to move past grief or something more longterm is unclear: He’s fragile but not dysfunctional, often morose but given to bursts of humor, altruism, and even passion. On the same day two women enter his life: Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the daughter of his father’s new business partner, and Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), an unstable blonde living in an apartment paid for by her married lover. The tension between the two women plays out less schematically than it sounds in print, and while they clearly represent poles of security and adventure to Leonard, neither of them are cardboard characters. (Nor are any of the other people in the film, which offers rich parts to the likes of Isabella Rossellini and Elias Koteas.) Two Lovers is Phoenix’s third collaboration with the director James Gray, who has only made four films in fifteen years, and it’s not without merit to compare their working relation to DeNiro and Scorsese. All of Gray’s films (Little Odessa, The Yards, We Own the Night) are set in Jewish corners of Brooklyn with one foot in the old world and one in the new, where who your people are says a lot, maybe everything, about who you are. And like Scorsese, Gray wears his love for the great Italian filmmakers on his sleeve. I’m a little disappointed to read that Gray’s next film will be an adaptation of James Grann’s book The Lost City of Z, about an expedition into Brazil to find traces of a British officer who disappeared there in the 1920s: He just seems to be getting his footing, and I hope he comes back to Brooklyn in the future.

—m. faust