A song can say so much

“Songs have an amazing way of predicting the future. You can write a song and then six months later you’re living it. It’s the strangest thing.” So says singer-songwriter Glen Hansard, who stars as a singer-songwriter in “Once,” the tiny indie film that has quickly gone from critics’ darling to audience favorite with the kind of per-screen box office numbers that make studio executives’ hearts beat faster.

On this day, he’s unshaven and a bit weary, wearing a dark jacket and jeans, and he has the same guitar case that is slung over his shoulder for much of the film strapped to his back. He stumbles a bit comically, emphasizing his fatigue. It’s a “Purple Rose of Cairo” moment. The character has escaped from the silver screen and is somehow here in the flesh, in real life. It’s precisely why “Once” seems so genuine, because in many respects, it is real.

Like “The Guy,” the film’s central character, Hansard once busked the streets of Dublin for cash, taking out a bank loan to make a demo before eventually scraping his way to success with his band the Frames. “The Girl” is portrayed by costar Marketa Irglova, a 19-year-old Czech musician who collaborated with Hansard (on his 2006 solo album, “The Swell Season”) after meeting in Prague as virtual strangers. The story of “Once” is much like their own.

After toying with the idea of using Hansard’s songs in a film with professional actors, writer-director John Carney (a former bandmate of Hansard’s) opted to take a chance on Irglova, who had never acted before, and Hansard, who had only appeared in a small role in “The Commitments.”

Filmed for a little more than 130,000 euros on a digital camera -- often without the proper permits required for public spaces -- “Once” shrugs off all previous notions of the movie musical as hyper-bright fantasy spectacle.

The music in the film is less about performance and more about watching two people work at revealing themselves to each other. The dialogue is the bumbling type of tentative romance, while the songs lend a more confident voice to their deeper feelings. All of which comes together to make “Once” either an anti-musical or the first genuine musical, depending on your perspective.

“It actually bypasses your own logic, ‘cause a song kind of comes from an ethereal place more often than not,” Hansard says about how music can sometimes say more than actual conversation.

“It’s very hard to describe,” adds Irglova. “You know the famous phrase of being kissed by a muse? It’s exactly that. It’s [as if] somebody kissed you on the cheek and suddenly you have this idea, this thought comes out of your mouth that you didn’t even know you had.”

Songs have a way of idealizing moments in time, putting a tune to a memory, like how couples designate “our song” and go misty-eyed whenever the radio dial stumbles upon it. It’s why musicals are almost exclusively stories about love.

Romance is a delicate thing that could benefit greatly from a world where songs crop up in the most conventional situations.

It’s maybe why these two untrained actors handle the romantic aspect of their roles with such apparent ease (especially Irglova), because the leap out of the unreality of music isn’t such a big one. Their understanding of these characters is shaped by their music. For them, the interaction between songs and life is perfectly natural.

“I don’t think there’s the fairy-tale idea of there being just that one prince for you, that you need to find him, and without finding him you’re lost,” says Irglova. “Sometimes people come into your life with a mission, where they maybe push you in the right direction, say the right thing, inspire you in the right way. I think we might mistake that sometimes for it being more than it really is. Some people might just be messengers. Who is the right person to stay throughout your life and who is the right person to let go? I can’t judge that. It’s very personal.”

Hansard agrees, offering, “I believe that if joy exists between two people, let it happen. If it stops existing, split up. It’s the bottom line: Wherever magic exists, follow it. I think if you’re open to that kind of thing in your life, your life will be filled with magic. If you’re about commitment and if you’re about logic, then your life will be filled with commitment and logic.”

In art as it is in love, logic can be an unwelcome guest, serving to unravel our best intentions. But when Hansard and Irglova talk about how songs can just appear to them, like magic, and you see these things unfold during the course of the film, it is logic that seems more delicate than art.

“Once” shows by example how art can bridge the gaps between people. It has that ability to make you feel connected to something larger than yourself.

It’s a film that wins its own argument by doing itself what it tries to show through the relationship between these two people.

There is no imitating here, because life is art. And like any proper idealist, Hansard sees no risk in putting “Once” out into a world that might be too cynical (or too full of logic) to open itself up to something so visibly pure.

“If this film has any success at all, it’s our success,” he says. “If it fails, it’s our failure. There’s a great ownership in that.”