Jess & James is a captivating movie. It follows the line of a road trip film, divided into chapters, but it often goes off road into strange places–a herd of cows on a dirt road, for example, a cemetery, a large estate seemingly occupied only by one woman with a chapel, ripened citrus fruit, sheep, and a ghost child also part of it, the under pass of a bridge as a train crosses it above the two young men, and so on.In one town, the two young men meet a third. They become a trio of sorts and a part of their courtship, the courtship between Jess and James, but also a courtship among all three, Tomás included, is for two of them to dance on a narrow promontory as the third watches. Tomás is merely teaching each of the other two in turn how to dance while the other one looks on. But the moment, with its movement, its implications of both jealousy and adoration, takes on some of the rhythm of a rite.None of these moments is, in a way, driven by plot, though there is a narrative underlying the movie. The heart of it, in every sense, is the developing, deepening love between Jess and James. That is what the trip is about. But this is a film clearly influenced by the Latin American admiration, even love for magical realism, both in literature and film. That influence means that the movie is more given to what happens in and through its images, however strange or inexplicable, than in either character development or a driving plot. Its meanings are more lyrical than narratively logical as they might be in an artwork created from a stricter, more rational understanding of 'realism.'Magical realist film is hardly new. It has been an important part of Spanish and Latin America film making for decades. What is new is how Jess &James uses it for a gay love story. Or I should say it is almost new because Marco Berger has made use of it in several of his remarkable movies, too, though subtly, with less of an emphasis placed upon it. And there are others, many as good. Jess & James is wondrous, but in any work of magical realism, one ought not emphasize the magic at the expense of the realism. This film does not. Its feel for the real, what is true and necessary in all of its three main characters, keeps it grounded as well.It is in many ways a movie following the path of an archetypal road trip, one of the oldest narrative conventions in the world. Think Gilgamesh or Odysseus. But this is no epic. It is a gentler film, quiet, subtle, poignant, lovely, arresting. It is about love found and thereafter deepening in ways that are mysterious without being entirely inexplicable, in ways that are clear while also being, in a sense, miraculous and strange and imaginatively generous. It is a way of seeing love opening into its reality, a reality which includes love's lyric overflowing, its happiness.