Cyrano is a bold, rowdy adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac that reimagines its title character as a little person and fills its scenes with songs by The National. If that sounds like a big, weird swing, then you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the director is Joe Wright, who takes bigger, weirder swings than most studio filmmakers these days. Sometimes that pays off (his deliberately “staged” and strangely affecting Anna Karenina), and sometimes it does not (whatever the hell Pan was).

What’s most interesting about Cyrano is how thoroughly it doesn’t work, until it suddenly does. The opening scenes hit all the familiar beats, for those know and love the play, or its faithful 1950 and 1990 film adaptations, or (most likely) Steve Martin’s marvelous 1987 comic riff Roxanne: Roxane (an energetic Haley Bennett) is a single lady whose dire financial straights won’t convince her to wed the wealthy but vile De Guiche (Ben Mendelsohn). “Well, I won’t be rescued, I’m not in distress,” she insists, and hurries off for a night at the theater – which is interrupted by Cyrano (Peter Dinklage, terrific) and his brutal takedown of the hammy actor at the show’s center.

That same night, Roxanne lays eyes on Christian (a charismatic Kelvin Harrison Jr.), and it’s love at first sight, or at least lust (it should surprise no one familiar with the Wright oeuvre that he makes all of this extremely horny). Roxane is so thunderstruck that she goes to Cyrano, her friend since childhood – a bit of an odd story beat to swallow, considering how many years clearly separate them, but never mind – and asks him to help set them up. The snag, of course, is that Cyrano believes his “sole purpose on this earth is to love Roxane.”

We all know what happens next: Christian is beautiful but none too bright, so Cyrano ends up ghost-writing his love letters, expressing his own affection for Roxane in the process, and so on and so on. As you might expect, much of the burden of revisiting this oft-told tale in a fresh way falls on Dinklage’s shoulders – and he’s wonderful, easily capturing the character’s quicksilver wit, easily stung pride, and reservoir of emotion. The look on his face when he realizes she’s confessing her love but for someone else is a poignant moment of onscreen heartbreak, and kudos to Wright (and editor Valerio Bonelli) for holding as long as they do on the wrenching moment before he says to Christian, with poignant surrender, “Go to her.”

He also plays the comic beats with aplomb; screenwriter Erica Schmidt (working from her musical stage adaptation) threads out the funny moments from the original film and its remakes, and the jokes are well timed (my favorite: Cyrano pleading to Christian, “Can you at least take a look at this list of conversational witticisms?”)

But Cyrano struggles, early on, with the same problem of so many “musical versions” of theatrical and cinematic classics: all those elements are present in the original version, so when it still lands played straight, you really have to give the songs a reason to exist. It’s not that they’re badly performed – Bennett’s voice is gorgeous, and Dinkledge sports a pleasing baritone – but they’re somewhat distractingly contemporary, and the first few seem less like narrative necessities than stuck-on appendages.

But once the story hits the second act, the main trio sings a song together (but apart) about their love and their letters, and it’s like the film has suddenly snapped to attention – we understand exactly what Wright and Schmidt are going for. Because once this story hits the heightened emotions of the courtship, the device makes sense; the songs seem necessary to convey emotions too big for anything resembling conventional dialogue.

And once the picture makes that leap, it never looks back. The last hour or so just hums right along, working through the complications of their scenario, veering into tragedy without whiplash, and staging a number called “Wherever I Fall” that is, while something of a flight of semi-tangential fantasy, utterly lovely – open and vulnerable and moving in a way that you usually have to, well, go to a stage musical to find. Cyrano is a recommendation with reservation; it gets off to such a rocky start, you may be tempted to bail. Ride it out. It’s worth the wait.

B

“Cyrano” is in theaters Friday.