TOUCH OF GRAY: Gwyneth Paltrow and Joaquin Phoenix.

“Are you a fuck-up?” Leonard Kraditor’s potential father-in-law pops this question abruptly near the conclusion of Two Lovers. Since Leonard is played by Joaquin Phoenix, the query could easily be coming from a curious audience. Entering this romantic-dilemma picture, we are all too conscious of Phoenix’s real-life crackup: his pledge to quit acting to become a rapper; his impossibly scruffy, incoherent appearance on Letterman; the incessant parodies at awards shows. Is it all a prank? Or has he really gone off the deep end? The mystery is only intensified by the film’s opening scene, a halfhearted suicide attempt that consists of Phoenix taking a long walk off a short pier.

But by the time the subject is directly broached in Two Lovers, Phoenix has rendered it obsolete. All the speculation, all the celebrity-scavenger rubbernecking, drops away in the face of his performance. What will endure, long after the gawkers disperse, is the actor’s magnetic discomfort—his ability to convey the agony of self-awareness. Watch his face carefully during his first meeting with an apartment-complex neighbor played by Gwyneth Paltrow. He makes a weak joke about her unhappy-sounding pet (“I don’t speak dog”), and for an instant, he beams with unforced, foxy charm—it’s the fleeting reprieve he grants himself before the cloud of self-disgust shadows his features again. Fretful mother Isabella Rossellini mentions that Leonard might be bipolar, but Phoenix presses the character’s disturbance past clinical dismissal; he is manic and depressive at the same time, sleeping till noon and chewing gum furiously as soon as he wakes.

His surroundings are nearly as moody. Director James Gray has previously stuck to crime pictures, and Two Lovers is shot as a richly feverish throwback to the ’70s, as if Leonard were posed to take the reins of a Mafia clan instead of inheriting a Brighton Beach laundromat. Looking over a wall of family photos, Leonard, who is at his most revealing when joking, cracks: “I was adopted. I was in line to be king of Denmark.” This might be just a literary allusion, and indeed Two Lovers is a drama about indecision, as Leonard drifts between caring Jewish princess Vinessa Shaw and strung-out shiksa Paltrow. (For once, the latter actress’s annoying vanity is put to good use—if she is Leonard’s dream girl, it is because Leonard has bad dreams.) Two Lovers is not a tragedy, however, but an epitaph on a certain kind of romantic feeling, one that Leonard cannot concede he has outgrown. It is a contemporary visit to the territory of Philip Roth at his most fragile—Goodbye, Columbus with cell phones. And if it is in fact Joaquin Phoenix’s last performance, we should grant him his silence. He has said enough. R.