A collection of wrenching love songs couched in the receding wake of counterculture ideals, Joni Mitchell's 1971 album Blue lends a song ("A Case Of You") and a prevailing tone to Waking The Dead, director Keith Gordon's intriguing but deeply flawed ethereal romance. Channeling the Watergate-era skepticism of The Candidate into a moody romantic ghost story, Gordon practically invents a new genre altogether, which may explain why he has so much trouble making it work. But he invests an enormous amount of feeling into the densely layered story, which weaves two different periods in the life of an ambitious politician who becomes convinced that his slain lover is still alive. The film opens in the early '70s, as America's waning years in the Vietnam War have induced a climate of widespread disillusionment. But cynicism hasn't yet engulfed Billy Crudup, a young Coast Guard officer who enlisted because "it's not the army, Canada, or jail," or his girlfriend Jennifer Connelly, a fierce social activist who dies in a politically motivated car-bombing. Flash forward a decade later, when Crudup, now running for his first congressional seat, believes he sees and hears her nearly everywhere he goes. The big mystery in Waking The Dead—is she or isn't she alive?—doesn't matter much because Connelly's character is really just Crudup's conscience made flesh; in one heavy-handed moment, he's told she'll always be his Jiminy Cricket. Though this weighty metaphor makes their affair seem a little too remote, Gordon's equation of lost love with lost ideals creates an atmosphere of palpable sadness. Crudup, in a wonderfully internalized performance, carries the sunken look of a man who genuinely wants to help people but isn't above the compromise that comes with the life he's chosen. Waking The Dead isn't especially nuanced in its politics, nor does it have to be, because Gordon is more interested in the simple decision to embrace a wounded system. The film itself, at once haunting and frustrating, poses a similar problem.