Spend only a few minutes talking to anyone affiliated with “Romance & Cigarettes,” the star-studded musical written and directed by John Turturro and set on streets of his childhood neighborhood in Queens, and it becomes obvious that they know the film is not for everyone. Critics and early audiences alike have seemed surprised by this tough, unromantic look at love and marriage in the form of an atypical musical centering around a middle-aged couple no longer sure if they are right for each other.

Others have focused on something far more specific: the music. “Nothing like this has really been done before,” the film’s music supervisor, Chris Robertson, said. “That’s the movie’s strength, but what also ended up holding it up [in distribution]. Some people don’t quite know how to take it.”

For that matter, most insiders don’t quite know how to label it, either. “Romance & Cigarettes,” which will make its debut next Friday at Film Forum, fuses iconic pop songs from the second half of the 20th century with the actual singing from the actor on-screen — a bizarre sort of duet. Some have described the movie’s style as “karaoke”; others have thrown around terms like “miming” and “sing-a-long.” Whatever you want to call it, watching James Gandolfini, Kate Winslet, Christopher Walken, and Susan Sarandon sing and dance to the music of James Brown, Elvis Presley, Bruce Springsteen, Janis Joplin, and a dozen others, with their voices mixed together with those of the original artists, is certainly a unique cinematic experience.

Mr. Robertson, who was introduced to Mr. Turturro by the Coen Brothers, who serve as producers on this film and have overseen Mr. Turturro’s best screen performances, said the director made the decision about adopting this unusual “karaoke” scheme long after the end of principal photography, in the midst of the movie’s editing.

“It was sort of funny how it evolved,” said Mr. Robertson, who was responsible for securing the rights and clearances for the movie’s extensive soundtrack. “Originally, John just saw it as the actors would be lip-synching to the music, but then when he shot the film, they’d actually be singing along. I don’t think he originally intended to use their voices at all, but then as he mixed it, there were parts when it really worked. It had a lot to do with the actor — some songs just worked better to have the actor singing, while others it was best to just let the artist sing it.”

The effect of this technique on the audience is critical, for it requires the classic tune — such hallmarks as “Little Piece of My Heart” and “Man Without Love” — to stand side-by-side with the live film performance. To go further in either direction — having the actors merely lip-synch, or remixing the famous songs to use only the actor’s voices — would have created an entirely different movie. But as it stands in the final cut, Mr. Robertson said, the technique achieves a peculiar kind of perfection.

“When John started layering in other voices, you could just tell it worked,” he said. “It brings you in, rather than requiring you to distance yourself. The actor’s still there, he’s singing, but at the same time you can hear the other track coming up. It’s like you’re in two different worlds, but always keeping one foot in this so-called reality.”

Since dividing critics at the Venice Film Festival, “Romance & Cigarettes” has encountered a number of speed bumps on its way to the general public, including the sale of MGM/United Artists to Sony in fall of 2004. A number of the film’s supporters and crew members interviewed by The New York sun expressed a sense of exasperation and frustration, not only over the film’s delayed journey from the festival circuit to American movie screens, but over the decision to give “Romance & Cigarettes” a more limited, platform release, rather than nationwide opening next weekend.

For his part, Mr. Robertson said he thinks the film is a slam dunk for audiences craving a departure from the summer Hollywood fare. “sony ended up with a handful of films they inherited and they didn’t know what to do with all of them,” he said. “I can just picture them scratching their heads over this one, a very different sort of film that some might think is hard to market. But to me, with a cast like this, who cares? Honestly, just get it out there, and people are gonna come.”

Ms. Sarandon, who plays one half of the film’s central married couple — a wife forced to distance herself from her husband (played by Mr. Gandolfini) due to his philandering — said she thinks the film’s surrealistic musical sequences give an already great film a whole new dimension.

“I felt that this music was their poetry,” the Oscar-winning actress said of the film’s blue-collar couple. “When they get into a place where they can’t express their emotions, the vernacular of the pop song is what they use. Even though you could be mixing periods and styles, these are all songs used by them to convey what they really couldn’t say. For me, it kind of felt like a [Pedro] Almodóvar film, where you have fantasy, and things are seamlessly going from daydreaming to something else. Everyone here was working for no money — and I think very interesting things can happen when you don’t have any money.”

Mary-Louise Parker, who, along with Mandy Moore and Mr. Turturro’s cousin, Aida Turturro, plays one of Ms. Sarandon’s and Mr. Gandolfini’s three daughters, said the film was a labor of love for the entire cast. In her case, filming took place not long after she had given birth — Mr. Turturro regularly paused shooting, she said, to allow her to nurse — and she said she would not have set foot on a movie set for anyone other than him.

“He’s such a creative director, and to work with someone like this, in an environment that’s so alive and surprising, it helps you to be brave and take new chances,” she said. “The music and the dancing all fits into that; there weren’t 20 people who came in at the last moment and tried to ‘fix it,’ or said, ‘Test audiences are saying this.’ John just doesn’t care about that, it’s not who he is. He’s one of my heroes in the way he made this his own, he went against the norm and reinvented the musical.”

But Ms. Sarandon added that a sense of intimidation often comes along with that sort of reinvention, but that Mr. Turturro’s experience in front of the camera, as well as behind it, put the cast at ease.

“It’s not every actor who can direct, but it’s so great to have a director who’s also a great actor and who can appreciate the process,” she said. “I think you can sense that in the final film, this feeling of taking chances, and maybe that’s what has thrown some people, that they can’t say ‘it’s this or that,’ they can’t pigeonhole it, and that can be kind of threatening.”

ssnyder@nysun.com