Malick's cast strikes the right chords in 'Song to Song'

As filmmakers obsessed with his early work continue to ape his style, Terrence Malick has ventured beyond, reaching into territory that is stubbornly spiritual and anti-narrative. He eschews story conventions. He turns movie stars like Ben Affleck and Christian Bale into props, using them not for their acting but their broad shoulders that fill up the screen as ethereal women twirl around them. He has become his own genre and with experimental reveries like “To the Wonder” and “Knight of Cups,” he has alienated some of his most ardent fans.

That modern trilogy concludes with “Song to Song,” taking the filmmaker and his stars Rooney Mara, Ryan Gosling and Michael Fassbender to his adopted hometown of Austin, Texas. For those who wrote off Malick after “To the Wonder” or “Knight of Cups,” it's unlikely that “Song to Song” will inspire a change of heart. But for the others, “Song to Song” is entirely worthy and even invigoratingly different from the previous two. There's actually a plot (kind of) and the actors are allowed to act and even have some life and (gasp) fun.

“Song to Song” is a love triangle of sorts, very much in the Malick mode, where one is pure (Mara and Gosling's struggling musicians), one is untenable (Cate Blanchett and Gosling), one is damned (Fassbender's sleazy, wealthy producer and Mara) and one is doomed (Natalie Portman's local waitress/teacher and Fassbender). There are others sprinkled in too, mostly for the guys. As retrograde as it is, in Malick's worlds they're emboldened to sleep around in the name of searching. The women are a different story.

If there is a main character it's Mara's Faye, who we're told is a musician although we never see her playing - only idly holding a guitar. She's a local girl ashamed of her “bad heart” who takes up with both Gosling's BV and Fassbender's Cook at the same time. The innocent BV remains ignorant to this, even as the three become close enough to vacation together. Faye flits between the two and the tension builds as we wonder when the charade of fidelity is going to lift.

Combined with Emmanuel Lubezki's sumptuous cinematography, these travel scenes are fairly riveting. At times I even forgot I was watching a Malick film, which has somehow become more of a compliment recently than a criticism. There are unexpected moments of joy, too, that don't involve fields or women twirling or cryptic voice-overs: BV dancing in the dusk to Del Shannon's “Runaway,” BV and Cook weightless on a plane, Patti Smith giving sage advice, Val Kilmer taking a chain saw to an amp. Do they add up to anything? Maybe mood. Maybe nothing.

But it's wild and confident and unlike anything that his peers are making.

Gosling in particular is a refreshing presence. He lets his smarmy charisma shine through Malick's words, which many actors before him have taken too seriously and made lifeless. Gosling flirts and smirks while Fassbender festers with menace. Mara is enthralling if a little hard to grasp. Malick's women are usually more enigmas than characters - paragons of grace and goodness who must in turn experience deep shame when they stray. It's a one-sided and almost biblical morality that may have made sense in his period pieces, but is glaringly odd in these contemporary stories.

Still Malick's just doing his own thing. Everyone's still running to catch up with what he did in the '70s. He's already on another planet.