Years from now, "Two Lovers" will either be known as Joaquin Phoenix's last film or the one released in that little hiccup when the actor said he was quitting the business to be (gulp) a rapper.

For the good of the movies, I hope it's the second scenario, because the profession needs a performer of Phoenix's power and charisma. Here, you root for his character to pick the woman we know is best for him -- even if he doesn't realize it just yet.

In the romantic drama that pairs the actor with director James Gray for the third time, Phoenix is Leonard, a secretive man with a suicidal streak who moved back in with his parents in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, after a broken engagement. He's been home for four months, longer than he anticipated, but two very different women are about to enter his life.

One is Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), daughter of the businessman who wants to buy the dry cleaning business operated by Leonard's parents (Isabella Rossellini and Moni Monoshov). The other is Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), a new and emotionally needy neighbor who lives across the courtyard.

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'Two Lovers'

3 stars = Good
Ratings explained

• Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Gwyneth Paltrow, Vinessa Shaw
• Rating: R for language, some sexuality and brief drug use
• Web site: twoloversmovie.com

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Sandra is taken with Leonard, who in turn is a moth to the flame of the blond beauty Michelle, who happens to be in the middle of her own soapy melodrama. More than one character has two lovers, and that's one too many in each case.

"Two Lovers" is an old-fashioned, atmospheric yet modest film about not-so-modest subjects: longing, love, rebirth.

Gray and co-writer Richard Menello loosely based the movie on the same Dostoyevsky story that inspired the 1957 Luchino Visconti film, "White Nights," with Marcello Mastroianni and Maria Schell as restless souls who meet on a canal bridge and begin a romance.

Here, a bridge feeds a destructive impulse and the principals are workaday people who see Manhattan and all it promises as alluring. They're in their 30s and living at home or dependent on someone else for the rent but their emotions are as deeply felt as any on a grand, operatic stage.

Phoenix is boyish and bullish about the prospect of love, Paltrow a bundle of insecurities and Shaw a woman who isn't afraid to tiptoe toward happiness but isn't sure she will reach the finish line.