The 1991 feature stars River Phoenix and Lili Taylor in the story of a cruel joke that turns into a momentous encounter between a Marine and a waitress.

A good movie hug, one that’s more than a neat tie-up, can pack a wallop, especially in the final stretch of a gripping story. The proportions of bittersweet angst and healthy schmaltz vary. The situation might be a charged reunion, a heartrending goodbye or a romantic declaration. Films as unalike as It’s a Wonderful Life, E.T. and Reds offer memorable clinches. But I can’t think of a screen embrace as packed with complex emotion and metaphoric zing as the one that closes Dogfight.

The tale of a callow Marine recruit’s attraction to an idealistic aspiring folksinger is a parable of innocence and experience, as well as a piercing look at narrow notions of male identity and unforgiving standards of female beauty. Set primarily in 1963, with a four-years-later coda, Dogfight captures a moment that was, in essence, the cusp of what we think of now as “the ’60s.” The main action unfolds just days before President Kennedy’s murder shocked a nation out of its postwar comfort. This was a charged and tender time in American culture, illuminated by the charged and tender hours that Phoenix and Taylor’s characters spend together.

It was Savoca’s second film, after her scrappy indie True Love, a wry X-ray of the pressure to wed that won Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize. Dogfight took her into the studio fold, but, thankfully, the higher production budget doesn’t impose a distancing gloss on this intimate story. A spirit of idiosyncrasy fuels every moment. The supporting performances (including the brief big-screen debut of Brendan Fraser) are well etched, and the two exceptional leads dig deep without the least bit of showiness. With Seattle standing in for San Francisco in most scenes, the great-looking and smartly designed film is suffused with an element of make-believe, an aura that lends it the impact of a fable, even as the characters and their moment-to-moment drama pull you in.

Taylor, who was 23 when she took on the role of Rose Fenny, had made an impression in the coming-of-age features Mystic Pizza and Say Anything. Phoenix was only 19 during production, and already an Oscar-nominated star (for Running on Empty, in which he played a gentle soul who was, by all accounts, closer to his offscreen pacifist self than the gung-ho jarhead in Dogfight). In a new interview for the Criterion release, Savoca says that when Warner Bros. cast Phoenix, it gave him approval over Dogfight‘s director. He chose wisely; what might have turned into a broad teen comedy in less sensitive hands is instead an unclassifiable gem that grows more luminous with each viewing.

Not unlike James Dean and John Cazale, Phoenix, who died in 1993, left behind a filmography that’s as extraordinary as it is tragically brief, and Dogfight is among the highlights. The Marine he plays, Eddie Birdlace, is about to turn 19, and not far beneath his bullshitter bravado, he’s a naïve kid. In San Francisco on the eve of his deployment to Okinawa, he’s hoping for an uncomplicated assignment to Vietnam — a place where, he and the rest of America have been told, the United States is taking a purely “advisory” role. What a difference a few months and a Gulf of Tonkin Resolution can make. (Savoca, who was born in 1959, has recalled watching young men in her working-class Bronx neighborhood go off to Vietnam “proudly and with great zeal.”)

On their night out, with its twists and turns, they’re children playing dress-up — her hairspray and fusty organza, his thrift-store dinner jacket. And they’re young grown-ups peeling off the remnants of the ’50s, the prescribed roles, though she’s certainly more ready to do so.

The youngest in a long line of Roses, she takes inspiration from the pantheon of folksingers whose photos grace her bedroom walls. That her watchful mother is played by a renowned folksinger (and occasional actor), Holly Near, is more than a nice touch; with only a few lines and several pointed glances, Near conveys a single mother’s backstory, no explication necessary.

A phrase that came to mind the last time I watched Dogfight is “the woman who slept with men to take the war out of them,” the memorable title of an early-’80s novel by Deena Metzger. Rose has hardly taken on such a specific project, but her sincerity has a cleansing, awakening effect on Eddie. Bit by bit, her fierce innocence gets to him, whether she’s being gentle and patient or slugging him for participating in the dogfight.