"David & Layla" is a romantic comedy ... with a conscience, although its history lesson is concise and plays second fiddle to the love story of a Jewish man from New York and the Kurdish Muslim refugee he falls for. She lost her family in Iraq under Saddam Hussein's reign and is living, on borrowed visa time, with an uncle and other relatives in New York.

That makes it sound like a "message" movie when it really has all the usual elements of the romance genre: a meet-cute (although it's more of an almost-meet cute), friendly advice, family friction and obstacles real and imagined.

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'David & Layla'

• Starring: David Moscow, Shiva Rose
• Director: Jay Jonroy
• Rating: R for sexual content, some language and brief drug material.
• Web site: davidandlayla.com/

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Layla (Shiva Rose), for instance, turns up for Passover dinner with what she thinks is the perfect hostess gift: bread, baklava and chocolate, most of which lands in the closet and umbrella stand, not the table. David (David Moscow), meanwhile, had scaled a ladder to Layla's bedroom to deliver a bouquet of roses, only to be met by a broom that sent him tumbling to the ground.

"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have listened to my cameraman. He's French," David says, by way of explaining his grandly romantic gesture, which throws him for a loop.

And that's for starters. Just wait until she asks him to become a Muslim. He's agnostic, and his observant Jewish parents are none too happy with the idea, either.

"David & Layla," opening at the Regent Square Theater on Friday, was inspired by a true story although names and other details have been changed.

Writer-director-producer Jay Jonroy was an Iraqi refugee living in Paris in the 1990s when he met the woman who became the model for Layla.

Her parents, like Jonroy's, hailed from Kurdistan although she had managed her family's travel agency in Baghdad before escaping. It was during a flight to San Francisco, to attend a Kurdish wedding, that she met a Silicon Valley resident who worked for a new technology company.

They clicked and then learned she was Kurdish and Muslim, he Jewish. Jonroy, who later moved to New York, decided if he fictionalized the cross-cultural romance that it had to be comedic, particularly after 9/11.

That, no doubt, explains David's job as host of a public access TV show called "Sex & Happiness" in which he explores such topics as the possible link between spicy foods and spicy relationships. Or his engagement to an aggressive kick boxer who calls the shots in bed.

Layla has a secret sensuous side herself but there is no mistaking what happened to her family. TV footage offers a capsule reminder about the disappearance of 180,000 Kurds in northern Iraq and poison gas attack on the town of Halabja. But that's her brutal back story, not the focus of the film.

"David & Layla" brims with the same optimistic spirit as romantic comedies about other couples bound by differences and desire. Its combination of bitter and sweet (emphasis on the latter) is not always smooth, but it is unusual and blessed by Rose's performance, in particular.

That Jonroy can make such a movie is proof of the resiliency of the human spirit. He dedicates "David & Layla" to his sister, whose husband was kidnapped and later found murdered, and to his brother, who disappeared in 1993 and whose remains were found in a mass grave in Abu Ghraib in 2003.

Jonroy is expected in Pittsburgh to introduce the film before the 8 p.m. Friday showing at the Regent Square Theater, 1035 S. Braddock Ave., and to take questions afterward.