Joe Swanberg has a career of remarkable stylistic variety. He started, in 2005, as a do-it-yourself filmmaker, with budgets in the low four figures, and built up an informal stock company of then unfamiliar actors who quickly distinguished themselves in the field—including Greta Gerwig, whose career was launched by her leading role in his freewheeling 2007 movie “Hannah Takes the Stairs.” In 2013, he changed course drastically, directing Anna Kendrick, Olivia Wilde, Jake Johnson, and Ron Livingston in the romantic comedy-drama “Drinking Buddies.” The project was followed by a set of similarly star-powered movies and three seasons of his Netflix series “Easy,” which ran from 2016 to 2019. The release of his new feature, “The Sun Never Sets,” his first in six years, starring Johnson (their fourth film together) and Dakota Fanning, shows the persistence of his distinctive sense of cinematic form and his keen ability to shape elaborate stories from precise ideas. But the film also demonstrates that he has found new ways of working, with new results—he has thrust his ideas to the foreground.

The movie is set in Anchorage, Alaska, where Wendy (Fanning) operates a bulldozer on construction sites. She’s an unmarried woman in a romantic relationship with Jack (Johnson), an apparently fortysomething money manager transplanted from New York and a divorced father of two young children, Abby (Charlie Golike) and Jude (Kincaid Zatalokin). The couple is jovial and tender, independent and connected, and Wendy and the children have developed a warm bond. But there’s a problem: Jack is set in his domestic and paternal ways, and he doesn’t want to get married or have any more children. For Wendy, Jack’s red lines aren’t an issue, but he thinks that Wendy, who’s thirty-one, would eventually regret renouncing marriage and children, so he insists that they take a six-month break in the relationship. He has no doubts about his love for her and no intention of dating other women, but he wants her to date other men so that, by way of comparison, she can assure herself that what she wants from life is life with him, on his terms. What could go wrong?

Surprised and bewildered, Wendy goes on a grudging date with an awkward, doting friend (Brandon Daley) who has long had a crush on her. At the bar with him, she’s startled to make eye contact with an ex-boyfriend named Chuck (Cory Michael Smith), a small-aircraft pilot and a rough-mannered outdoorsman, also around thirty, who has just come back to town. They broke up three years ago, seemingly after some ugliness; now they instantly become a couple again, and Jack desperately tries to undo his agreed-upon plan.

The dramatic mechanism of “The Sun Never Sets” is exquisitely precise—the story’s stakes, in the big picture, are slight, but, for its principals, they’re colossal, catastrophic, life-changing, and Swanberg makes every turn feel like a twist of a knife. What’s especially unusual is how the film makes the underlying structure of this drama visible, rather than making its effects felt in the action. Swanberg displays a seemingly physical awareness of that construction, exposing the story’s large-scale architectural lines as if images were made of glass.

This attention to dramatic framework is a logical extension of Swanberg’s prior body of work. All of his films are largely rooted in improvised performances—he creates stories, plots them out into scenes, and then grants the actors a large margin of freedom in inventing dialogue and stage business. It’s what he did when working with not-yet-professionals and utterly untrained actors in his first films; it’s what he also did with “Drinking Buddies,” “Easy,” and everything in between; and he does it in “The Sun Never Sets,” too. In order to make the method work—which is to say, in order to give the actors guidelines tight enough to shape their performances to a sharp point—he has always made each scene’s function in the plot specific and conspicuous. From there, his casts’ inventive performances push his movies in two directions, bringing a filigree of detail to the story that Swanberg might never have anticipated, and uniting the actors with the characters they play. But “The Sun Never Sets” shifts the balance of these elements and thus gets striking new results from the cast.

“The Sun Never Sets” elides characterization. It rarely suggests what might be happening in the inner lives of its characters; it gives few clues about their interests, tendencies, ideas, or principles, and only grants them those traits which fit the logic of the drama like pegs in slots. The story has no shadows; the characters exist as what they are onscreen, and it’s hard to imagine them off it. This extreme foregrounding of character in terms of action endows the cast with a retrospective air of typecasting, in a positive sense—the actors seem made for their parts, coalescing with their characters temperamentally.

Considered from one angle, the movie is superficial and conventional, zipping heedlessly between the characters without fretting about point of view, creating scenes that don’t so much illuminate characters as simply push the story along. For instance, the film starts with Wendy’s visit to a marina in the hope of buying a particular boat; it quickly turns out to be something of a sticking point with Jack, who’s not an outdoorsman and has no desire to join her time aboard it. In the next scene, at an outdoor gathering, her friend Lindsay (Debby Ryan) announces that she’s pregnant; the elaborate surrounding bustle all but evaporates beside the disclosure that the two friends have long planned to get pregnant around the same time. Wendy laments to Jack that she has lost, as she puts it, her last friend who can join her spontaneously on fun adventures. The fault lines are thus quickly drawn, and the increasing stress prompts Jack to impose, that very night, his strategic pause on the relationship.

In most other films, these narrow constraints would be unequivocal failings. But in “The Sun Never Sets” they’re features, not bugs. The perspective sustained throughout isn’t that of any one character but that of Swanberg himself, and the movie proceeds as if he’s not so much suspensefully turning over its cards one by one but, rather, bringing out, with a dazzling clarity, its conceptual ideal from behind the tangle of events. Swanberg is focussed on his theoretical vision of modern romance—and forgive me for not spoiling it, but the ironies are whiplash-keen and psychologically audacious. The effect is to make the story feel almost like an allegory, abstracting just about everything that it touches—characters, settings, décor, dialogue. It is as if he designed the situation at the center of the movie to show that the traits of its characters are irrelevant to the results.

“The Sun Never Sets” is, so to speak, an experimental film—it looks at its situation as if under a microscope. It’s an extraordinary film masquerading as an ordinary one, a conventional romance on the surface that, on reflection, reveals Swanberg’s philosophical view of love: that people are drawn together by something fundamental, deep in the bedrock of selfhood, that transcends whatever manifest traits they might have in common.

I’m not sure that this idea holds as a general rule. I think that some seemingly surface-level character traits have a direct pipeline to the magma of soul and identity; other traits don’t. One of the most interesting and useful things that romantic drama, classic or modern, can do is to distinguish essential characteristics from trivial ones. Swanberg’s earlier films took such distinctions seriously. For instance, an exemplary scene in “Hannah Takes the Stairs” involves young screenwriters’ criticism of the Bush Administration and their discussion as to whether or not to include it in their work. By contrast, “The Sun Never Sets” exists in an atemporal, ahistorical void. Those early films were among the prime examples of what was then dubbed mumblecore: personal films, raw and free, made with self-conscious attention to performances emerging from real lives and converging with actors’ identities—and ideas.

The reason for these films’ emphasis on the many threads and trends of personality is, above all, youth. The thirteen ultra-low-budget features that Swanberg made between 2005 and 2012 (he was indeed prolific) gave the sense that they emerged from the stuff of his life, from observations within his social circle, reflecting his immediate realm of experience. As befits stories of young outsiders beginning careers and developing their art, they were stories of uncertainty, instability, struggle, and a search for identity itself; every aspect of a character is worthy of representation because much thought goes into the weighing of them all, their hierarchical triage. For the young filmmaker, as for the young person, personalities are tangled woods of curiosity and risk.

“The Sun Never Sets” may be personal in important ways (Swanberg is the divorced father of two children named Jude and Abby). But it also shows that Swanberg—who is twenty years into his career—has come to a clearing, with a strong sense of what he considers the essentials. What’s above all personal in “The Sun Never Sets” is the idea itself, the reflection on love and its strange destinies. The thinning-out of the film is also a clearing-out, putting his standpoint on the action into plain view. In his early films, Swanberg usually did his own cinematography; although his stories were, even then, conceived and shaped with precision, his images—even simple, locked-down tripod shots—were irrepressibly expressive. By contrast, the cinematography of “The Sun Never Sets,” by Eon Mora (who has worked with Swanberg since 2015), is so plain and inexpressive—so open, bright, and blank—that it’s practically a degree zero of pictorial neutrality, a visual correlate for abstract objectivity.

His earlier films offer the immediacy of real-time creation, of something not unfinished but unreworked, thrust onto the screen with an impulsiveness that’s balanced by the careful conception behind it. In “The Sun Never Sets,” the observation has been done in advance, in thought, and the working-out comes off as predetermined and inevitable. That’s why it’s better to have seen “The Sun Never Sets” than to see it, better to think about it than to experience it. The movie is filled with painful events, even laced with a chilly current of pain, along with an ultimate sense of overcoming and healing, however ironic it may be. The film leaves a viewer with authentic consolations and gratifications in the rearview mirror that seemed harder to discern while moving ahead into the unknown with the sun in one’s eyes. ♦