“Like Crazy” is about love, but I wouldn’t call it romantic. I wouldn’t call it precisely anything, which is part of the problem.

"Like Crazy"

The other is that, in Drake Doremus’ sweet-and-sour rubber band drama, there is far too much, and also far too little, show.

There is a girl (Felicity Jones) who likes a guy (Anton Yelchin) that she goes to school with. She tells him. They go on a date. They smile. They fall in love. She leaves back to London for the summer, with her parents. She does not come back.

There are other things going on at other times in “Crazy,” but the crazy thing is that the whole sum of them never quite sparks. Jones’ Anna and Yelchin’s Jacob go back and forth and forth and back across two continents, separated by time and space and other people. And they just want to be happy, man. But Doremus keeps picking away at their domesticity, wanting to track not just the way that love infects them, but also the way it spreads out into their lives until it sucks everything else out, so that that first-date rush becomes a high they’re always desperate to get back to. It’s a fascinating idea, but it hasn’t been done fascinatingly — leaving the film inaccessible even to itself, as if every hot-and-cold emotion were being acted behind glass.

The acting, for what it’s worth, tries hard to break through. Indeed, reportedly, the star pair worked through a lot of improvisatory exercises to get just at the rhythm between their characters — and, indeed, that work is clear in the many fluid gestures between each: a downcast eye or an insult that skews two degrees left of the heart. They make the act of mopey hipster love live, alive.

The rest of “Like Crazy,” however, is a little hippy-dippy. Beautifully shot and sharp — with a hundred different emotions running along its skin — but also overlong and bipolar and formulaic, leaving you longing for a moment that never comes: when one of them will just look at the other and say, “I’m just not that into you.”

Catch “Like Crazy” at Ciné through Jan. 12