"Remember Fail Safe?" says Robinson, an affable, animated sort who talks excitedly with his hands. In a small suite at the Hermitage Hotel, as his composer Paul Mills looks on laughing, he mimics President Henry Fonda placing a phone call to post-nuke Manhattan: " 'Hello, New York?...rrrrrrrr.' " Reflecting on days of unreturned calls and unanswered messages, the director realizes that he didn't even spend 48 hours in the buzz bin. "I was a big shot at Miramax for about 12 or 13 hours," he revises.

One suspects they'd return his calls now. Robinson's first feature, a deft and disarmingly gentle comedy-drama called Still Breathing, has been generating strong word of mouth since it played the closing night of last year's South by Southwest festival in Austin. After months of frustration and waiting, Robinson and Mills--the latter a curly-haired, bearded Franklin resident whose delicate score is one of the movie's many pleasures--now see their movie positioned as a sleeper hit for romance-starved audiences.

When Still Breathing premieres in local theaters Friday, as part of a five-city platform release before it breaks out nationally later in the month, it arrives bearing stacks of enthusiastic notices, a proven box-office draw on the marquee, and the promotional clout of a major distributor. And it's exactly the same movie other distributors and major festivals passed on 18 months ago.

Still Breathing starts off with a premise befitting a thriller: A San Antonio street performer, Fletcher McBracken, has a premonition of a woman, a gun, a struggle, and the word "FORMOSA" written in neon. The dream takes over his waking thoughts. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, a streetwise cookie named Roz fleeces rich Romeos with a high-stakes scam too good to give away. She too is tormented by visions--only hers involve ivy, a scrape on the knee, and an unprecedented sense of security.

From there, however, the movie sets float on a current of oddball humor, interlocked coincidences, and mystical sweetness. What opens as yet another film-noir rip becomes an airy romantic comedy that takes its tone from the sun-dappled San Antonio neighborhoods, the drift of the nearby river, and the lilt of Chopin's "Berceuse," which the director describes as "a narcotic piece of music that's what falling in love sounds like." Ultimately, it's a less raucous, more willowy version of the Preston Sturges gem The Lady Eve, whose hard comic edges and rat-a-tat pace are sorely missed in the film's waning moments.

Instead, Still Breathing offers an all-or-nothing love story, which turns out to be all the sexier for not having any onscreen sex; lush cinematography by John Thomas, who photographed Whit Stillman's droll comedies Metropolitan and Barcelona; and an engagingly offbeat supporting cast that meshes Celeste Holm, Michael McKean, and performance artist Ann Magnuson with Lou Rawls and guitar wizard Junior Brown in his film debut. (He plays a strange Texan, a real stretch.) Above all, it has two captivating lead performances: by Joanna Going, whose previous roles in Inventing the Abbotts and Phantoms only hinted at her gamine charm as Roz; and by Brendan Fraser, whose sneaky comic timing and instant likability are among the movie's most pleasing assets.

Robinson, a self-described Air Force brat who grew up in Texas, wrote the script about five years ago, partly in reaction to the L.A. riots. "In Los Angeles, control is everything because the city is out of control," he explains, hugging a throw pillow on one of the Hermitage's sofas. "The earth shakes, and the hills burst into flames; you never know what's going to happen. I find people either just give in and live a chaotic life or they try to carve out little niches of control." He pitched the script to various studios, none of whom wanted him to direct. At his lowest ebb, he even considered writing a shoot-'em-up cheapie when an associate sniffed out some investment money in Burma.

"I sat down and wrote an outline," he recalls, "and I thought, 'You know, I wouldn't even go to see this! I'm Mr. Sentimental Movie Guy!' Everyone's so frantic just to get a film made. If you've got a project going, you're someone. And if you don't, you're no one, or you're a has-been. There's all this frantic activity trying to convince people something's actually happening."

The backing of a single Seattle movie buff got the movie financed and completed by December 1996. Then the frustration began anew. Although Still Breathing picked up excellent notices at festivals around the country, it was rejected outright by Sundance, still smarting from its disastrous overhyping of the Castle Rock weeper The Spitfire Grill. Sundance's attitude was typical. Indie distributors thought the unabashedly romantic story was too commercial; mainstream distribs thought it lacked the violent chic of prevailing indie trends.

"We were in this Valley of the Unknown Indie Film, where there's no hit men, [none of the] usual indie trappings," Robinson says. Adds Mills, a successful contemporary-Christian producer who has worked with Robinson on several projects, "The indies think it's too Hollywood, and Hollywood thinks it's too indie."

Nevertheless, Robinson was given hope by the success of Like Water for Chocolate, one of the biggest-grossing foreign films ever released in America. When he asked friends why they'd seen the film six or seven times, they told him they liked its sense of magic and family. "That's the kind of thing you can do on a low budget, without a lot of special effects or movie stars," Robinson says. It helped that his wife, production designer Denise Pizzini, served on both Still Breathing and the earlier film.

It was Fraser's success last year in George of the Jungle, a surprise $100 million blockbuster, that triggered a new wave of interest in Still Breathing. After October Films was sold last year to the Universal conglomerate, the arthouse distributor began trawling for independent films with mainstream appeal, and last August the company picked up Still Breathing. Mills' score will be featured on a soundtrack album, alongside cuts by Junior Brown, Morphine, and Augie Meyers (though not by the late-'60s Nashville grrl-group The Feminine Complex, whose music plays onscreen in a barroom scene).

"Paul has a really good career ahead of him," says the director, his sneakers scuffing the carpet just a few inches from Mills' well-tooled cowboy boots. "I may try to drag him away from Franklin." Robinson has already drafted Mills for his next film, which he describes as a tragic romance set against the backdrop of the music industry in Los Angeles, South Texas--and Guatemala. It doesn't sound likely to charm the studios who passed on Still Breathing, and it isn't meant to.