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BY MAGGIE SCOTT

“My Blueberry Nights” chronicles the highlights of a 300-day journey out and back from the scene at a New York diner that broke a young woman’s heart.

“I’m looking for a reason,” Elizabeth (pop music princess, Norah Jones) mournfully tells Jeremy (Jude Law), the proprietor. He’s taken a shine to this woeful waif who defiantly and uselessly added the keys for her faithless boyfriend’s flat to the small cache Jeremy has been collecting from other abandoned lovers. “Sometimes it’s better not to know,” he advises; adding, “People make other choices.”

Jeremy’s wisdom comes from something basic: pies. He keeps a mental tally of how much he serves of each kind. There’s always more blueberry left. To somebody else, that would be evidence to cut the losses and stop ordering blueberry pie.

Not to Jeremy. He values the person who stands a bit apart from the herd. Jeremy believes Lizzy is one of those people. Right now, she’s suffering. What is she worth, if the person she loved rejected her? Jeremy knows she’s vulnerable. But, he won’t take advantage beyond a kiss stolen while she sleeps with her head on his counter—mouth flecked with bits of blueberry pie crust. 57 days later, Lizzy “walks away.”

Hoping to put pain behind her, she settles first in Memphis and then in Ely, Nevada. She doesn’t forget Jeremy. Postcards arrive, with no return address. Time, which can also disintegrate meaning and order, begins to heal and enlighten Lizzy, as she is pulled into the orbit of three people in various stages of denial dealing with lives running off the tracks: a policeman (David Strathairn) numbing the pain of a broken marriage with alcohol; his wife (Rachel Weisz), cruelly defying his smothering love with swaggering flaunting of her charms with another man; a young woman (Natalie Portman) seeking a father’s approval with a reckless life of gambling. Lizzy eventually “sees” herself in the mirror these people held up to her life.

She’s getting stronger; making peace with her loss and getting ready to “cross the street,” because it’s Jeremy that’s “waiting for her on the other side.” From the trite artiness of the neon-garish colors of Lizzy’s disoriented New York nights of despair, director Wong Kar Wai gradually sharpens the focus and blends in gentler shades a world she slowly begins to believe in again. In a role as dreamy and detached as a lot of her celebrated music, Jones makes a poignant acting debut.

Strathairn and Weisz sink their talented teeth into roles jarring in their display of the ruin and redemption love offers.

Rated PG-13 for mature material including violence, drinking, smoking.

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