Until recently, Ireland’s John Crowley had been best known as an innovative theatre director and playwright. In the past decade, he received nominations, awards, and kudos for plays like The Pillowman, Love Song, and a TV version of Harold Pinter’s Celebration, with Colin Firth and Michael Gambon. His initial film feature, an ensemble piece called Intermission, also won multiple festival awards. And he made three more low-key, dark features before assembling his finest effort to date, Brooklyn.

The new movie, which opens here Friday (November 20), stars Saoirse Ronan as Eilis Lacey, an Irish girl who grows up before our eyes after moving to New York in the early 1950s. Based on Colm Tóibín’s novel of the same name, Brooklyn has seen rapturous response almost everywhere it has gone.

“It’s a wonderful feeling,” says the director, a boyish-looking 46, upon meeting the Georgia Straight at a hotel during the Vancouver International Film Festival, where his movie is about to make its local debut. “It does seem to touch something in people, and that’s exactly what I was hoping for.”

Fighting a slight cold on this crisp fall day, Crowley asserts that the key to this emotional transference was the casting of Ronan (Hanna, The Lovely Bones) in a lead role that has to carry viewers on a quiet voyage to adulthood in a faraway and initially forbidding place. “Saoirse [pronounced “seer-shah”] is extremely beautiful in a certain kind of light but also looks like a regular person,” Crowley says. “She has an ethereal light and is somehow very grounded at the same time.”

The other key factor was an extraordinary screenplay by Nick Hornby, a popular humorist who also did a sensitive adaptation for An Education. “His intuitive grasp is such,” says Crowley, “that I knew he would never take Eilis in the wrong direction.”

Brooklyn benefits from gorgeous production design and unusually restrained use of Irish music, mostly in live dance-hall scenes.

“I tried to be so careful with that. It’s so easy to slip over into sentimentality. Music is very important to Celtic peoples, obviously, and the story is already so Irish, there was always a danger of overkill. So things are restricted to songs that would actually be played by show bands of the time.”

Atypically, for such a detailed period film, Brooklyn uses almost no contemporary pop songs to set the stage. And the filmmaker regrets not being able to further explore the multiculturalism of 1950s Brooklyn.

“We originally had a scene dealing with the overt racism of the period, and the variety of people living there at that time is something we really wanted to address,” Crowley says with a sigh, “but there just wasn’t time for everything.”

On the other hand, Crowley’s obvious rapport with actors can’t be faulted, from the wonderfully bratty kid (James DiGiacomo) who plays the little brother of Eilis’s Brooklyn boyfriend (Emory Cohen) to Domhnall Gleeson, who usually plays quirky or comic roles and here gets to play it straight as our heroine’s back-home suitor. But the thespian who most reminds one of Crowley’s dramatic roots is Julie Walter, the quick-tongued dictator of Eilis’s boarding house, filled with catty young ladies on the go.

“Oh, it wasn’t too much, was it?” asks the director, while waiting for a green tea that never arrives. “To my mind, that boarding house was like a kind of theatre, and Julie was meant to be its grande dame, ushering those girls—soon to be women—into the larger world outside.”