Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor offer more proof that they are among the best contemporary actors we have in The History of Sound, a resonant account of a tender but too-fleeting gay love affair interrupted by World War I. Adapted by Ben Shattuck from his jewel-like short story of the same name, the film’s romance and heartache are intensified by the intimate experience the two men share of traveling the backwoods of Maine in 1919, collecting traditional folk tunes and ballads from rural people, essentially the equivalent in music of an oral history.

South African director Oliver Hermanus had a breakthrough in 2019 with Moffie, a searing indictment of institutionalized homophobia in the Apartheid-era military. He switched gears from the visceral physical and psychological violence of that film to a more subdued approach three years later with Living, a delicate adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 classic Ikiru, scripted by Kazuo Ishiguro and led by Bill Nighy as a London bureaucrat diagnosed with terminal cancer, trying to make his remaining days meaningful.

A similar restraint governs Hermanus’ new film, which yields its rewards in an unhurried fashion but finds quiet power in understatement, its passion and yearning revealed in the eyes of its superb lead actors. The director is working very much in a classical vein, collaborating with cinematographer Alexander Dynan to view the drama through a painterly lens, with an elegant sense of composition and spatial dynamics and images that look frequently like they could have been ripped right out of an Andrew Wyeth painting.

The movie for many will be challengingly paced, as indicated by some walkouts during its first Cannes press screening. Comparisons with Brokeback Mountain seem inevitable, and Ang Lee’s beloved 2005 romantic tragedy remains in a class of its own.

But if you tap into The History of Sound’s soulful undercurrents, the soaring spiritual dimensions of the music — in songs more often about people than Divinity — and the depth of feeling in Mescal and O’Connor’s performances, this is a film of lingering melancholic beauty. The power of the music alone makes it one of the most unabashedly romantic LGBTQ films in recent memory.

Mescal plays Lionel, a Kentucky farm boy who shares in opening voiceover narration that he can “see” music. He can identify the exact note of his mother’s morning cough, a dog’s bark or a frog’s croak, and even tell the shape, color and taste of music. Impressed with his vocal skills, a schoolteacher helps him land a scholarship to the New England Conservatory in Boston.

Lionel is at a local bar there with friends one night when he recognizes a folk song his father (Raphael Sbarge) used to sing, coming from the piano. He introduces himself to the pianist, David (O’Connor), asking how someone in Boston comes to know an obscure Kentucky tune. David says traveling and collecting songs in the summers is his hobby.

Born in Newport and sent to London to live with an uncle after losing his parents, David is a more sophisticated type than Lionel, but they hit it off. Lionel names several songs from his background before he lands on one David has never heard. But when he sings “Silver Dagger,” a gorgeous traditional in which a mother warns her daughter of the wickedness of men, David is enchanted.

From that first encounter, Shattuck’s screenplay establishes their shared passion for folk songs and story ballads, a form that might be a poetic fit for the romance that develops between them.

David takes the lead at first, not asking but telling Lionel to walk him home after they shut down the bar and then inviting him up for a glass of water. O’Connor makes David witty, playful and not at all shy, spitting out a mouthful of water that the bewitched Lionel catches on his tongue, even before mutual desire has been acknowledged.

One of the loveliest things about this film compared to most queer period pieces is the absence of uncertainty and, mostly, shame. It’s not about the repression of the time or the fear of exposure, even if conventional expectations do weigh on one of the men later in the story. It’s about an instantaneous and enduring connection, anchored as much in music as in sexual attraction or romantic love.

When David is drafted in 1917 to fight in World War I, Lionel, excluded from the draft because of poor eyesight, is devastated, telling him: “Write. Send chocolate. Don’t die.” With classes at the conservatory shut down because of the war, Lionel returns to Kentucky, his unhappiness quickly detected by his hard-bitten mother (Molly Price). In a dryly amusing barb, she tells him he should never have gone to Boston in the first place, then he wouldn’t have minded coming back.

He hears nothing from David until two years later when a letter arrives. David has taken a position in the music department of a regional Maine college, where senior faculty have asked him to spend the winter traveling off the beaten path through the state to record the songs of ordinary people. “How about a long walk in the winter?” he writes. It’s not so much a question as a summons, but to Lionel it’s an invitation engraved in gold.

Those months they spend going from place to place on foot are observed with a kind of quiet rapture. Lionel learns to operate the phonograph, recording the songs on wax cylinders, while Paul takes down the lyrics and any information about the song’s origins. This yields some lovely encounters. One woman eyes the machine warily as if it’s a surgical instrument, asking “Will I feel something?” before launching into a beautiful traditional song, with her young daughters providing the sweetest harmonies.

“My grandfather once said that happiness is not a story, so there wasn’t much to say about those first weeks,” notes Lionel in voiceover. The factors that might intrude on any queer love affair in the early 20th century all but evaporate under the cover of wilderness, and even the harsh conditions of a Maine winter seem inconsequential when the two men are entwined in the tent, asleep.

One significant embellishment to Shattuck’s short story is a detour to Malaga Island, where the state governor is making plans to evict an interracial community of former slaves and poor immigrants. A Black woman who goes by Thankful Mary Swain (Briana Middleton) lends her heavenly voice to “Here in the Vineyard,” a song of praise so transporting that Lionel is moved to join in.

Heading back to the mainland while knowing the violent uprooting of the island people that’s to come, the lovers have their first disagreement, with Lionel saying they should have stayed and David insisting there was nothing they could have done.

That difference of opinion alters something between them. David asks, “Do you ever worry about this? What we’re doing?” Lionel replies simply, “No, I don’t worry.” The reliably wonderful O’Connor is especially good in these scenes as David begins the detachment process by suggesting Lionel go to Boston and teach or travel to Europe and make a living as a singer. He quickly nixes the idea of Lionel coming to work with him at the Maine college, claiming it’s too provincial to interest him.

The fact that Lionel would follow him there for love alone signals a switch in their relationship, where worldly David has become the cautious one and Lionel the one who knows his mind and stays firm. Their separation at Augusta station is wrenching, with David only showing his sorrow when he’s alone.

The latter sections of the movie meander at times as the narrative stretches beyond Shattuck’s story — Lionel joins a prestigious choir in Rome and has a half-hearted fling with a young Venetian (Alessandro Bedetti), whom he dumps for an offer in Oxford, where well-heeled bohemian Clarissa (Emma Canning) makes the mistake of thinking their relationship will lead to marriage.

What keeps the movie transfixing is Lionel’s poignant recollections of moments with David, fragments of conversation that play in his mind. In what might be his best performance since Aftersun, Mescal’s eyes reveal the accumulation of sorrow, the creeping realization that he will never again be as happy as he was those weeks in Maine.

The ending is somewhat protracted, but it’s worth the wait to see national treasure Chris Cooper turn up as Lionel in 1980, by that time a respected ethno-musicologist. A televised interview about his newly published history of folk music catches the attention of someone who sends him a gift that’s been gathering dust in her attic. The scene that follows, in which the past comes flooding back to Lionel as he sits at the piano, has a depth of feeling that’s almost overwhelming.

Hermanus again shows highly polished craftsmanship, adding the subtlest hint of sepia tones to evoke the period in the early sections, but never to the point where the characters compete with the settings. His direction of the actors is exemplary, even with characters seen only briefly, like Lionel’s parents or the humble backwoods folks who share their songs.

Woven into an affecting, predominantly string score by Oliver Coates, the music interludes are without exception sublime, including those sung tunefully but with more gusto than vocal skill by O’Connor and those invested with full-throated feeling by Mescal.

They range from expressions of sorrow or love, murder ballads or even something as delightfully morbid as “The Unquiet Grave,” in which a dead woman laments her true love’s constant presence at her headstone, disturbing her rest. The echo of that song in the ballad of David and Lionel is both sweet and shattering.