If you're a fan of movies where real men manage to break taboos about touching without actually fucking, a tough-minded, tendered-hearted new film, The Messenger, may be just the ticket.

If Jeremy Renner's job in The Hurt Locker – defusing terrorist bombs in Iraq – is the shittiest vocation not specifically available on Craigslist, then number two, with a bullet, has got to be the job assigned Ben Foster's Sgt. Will Montgomery. Just back from a second or third combat tour, Will has been dumped by his girl, had an eye damaged and a leg impaired, and, as he sits alone in his room, finds his only viable option is to re-enlist. That's until he meets a sadder sack: Woody Harrelson's Capt. Tony Stone. Stone, who's profanely nurturing a private sorrow, begins as Will's boss at the Army's Casualty Notification Office, but quickly morphs into drinking buddy and bearer of tough advice: "Never touch the next of kin. You do not speak to anybody except the next of kin. Avoid physical contact – in case you feel like offering a hug or something, don't!"

 As Will and Tony complete their rounds, their hardest task is ducking when the newly bereaved try to touch them. Tony smartly advises, "Be careful of the men, they can hurt you." And sure enough, a dead soldier's father, out of his mind with grief (Steve Buscemi, playing against his inner wimp), practically mugs Will in a parking lot. But then Will stumbles across a young widow (Samantha Morton) struggling to raise a grade school-age kid, and suddenly all bets are off.

On the record

In town to talk up The Messenger, Woody Harrelson agreed with me that perhaps the film's best example of two people reaching out without physically touching involves a tour de force moment in a small, dark kitchen between Foster and Morton. Harrelson, who some industry observers considered all wrong, too much of a pacifist to play the embittered Captain Stone, compliments director Oren Moverman for creating a brilliant scene by specifically defying his producer's orders. "He didn't want scenes shot without cutaways [for editing], and Oren was already a little bit in hot water, but he had his vision, and he shot that nine-minute scene, which was actually a rehearsal. [Ben and Samantha] didn't even think the cameras were rolling on them, and that was the scene that he used. At the risk of getting fired, he just carried on with his vision."

Following his primetime TV role as the stud bartender in the CBS mega-hit Cheers, Harrelson has put together a remarkable, daring film resume, rocketing between the seemingly unfilmable life of a girlie magazine king, The People vs. Larry Flynt, to a washed-up boxer savagely bashing his best buddy in the ring in Ron Shelton's Play It to the Bone, to last year's (2008) mesmerizing portrait of an openly gay, ladies' social escort in the sadly underappreciated The Walker.

An actor's actor who's shrewd in his estimation of other people's work and often effusive in his praise, Harrelson is tough on himself. Noting that he never felt he quite captured this most elusive of characters – a man who's no role model for young gays, and whom many mainstream gays might shun – Harrelson described the difficulty of working on The Walker for writer/director Paul Schrader. "There were a lot of challenges in the shooting of that movie. I guess the hardest part was looking at it afterwards and feeling that I sucked!"

Despite its heralded war theme, The Messenger will probably be best remembered for its emotionally searing payoff between the men. Harrelson hails his young co-star "as a young Sean Penn," and Ben Foster certainly dazzles as a young man defusing the rage within. It's the same rage that flowed so effortlessly as his revenge-seeking meth addict in Nick Cassavetes' Alpha Dog, while providing a glimpse at a gentler but severely conflicted soul, like Claire's not-gay boyfriend in HBO's Six Feet Under.

Oren Moverman acquired some of his feel for the material during a brutal four-year stint with the Israeli Army in Lebanon. Moverman's understated work (with co-writer Alessandro Camon) will remind fans of honest war movies like Hal Ashby's The Last Detail.