Starring Eddie Peng. In Mandarin and Japanese, with English subtitles. Rated 14A

Tackling multiple themes associated with the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong during the Second World War, this well-crafted epic spends more time on poetry and personal entanglements than on derring-do—although crackingly choreographed fight scenes erupt often enough to keep the film’s 130 minutes moving swiftly.

Director Ann Hui has lately been alternating between big-budget historical dramas (like The Golden Era) and small-scaled indie stuff (A Simple Life). In Our Time Will Come, she tackles the little-known, fact-based tale of guerrilla fighters who spirited artists and intellectuals out of the enemy’s clutches.

Things begin with a dissident writer rescued by a Robin Hood–like hero called Blackie Lau, played by versatile, Vancouver-raised rising star Eddie Peng (Rise of the Legend). He soon meets shy schoolteacher Fong Lan (Cloud Atlas’s Zhou Xun, who manages to be both ethereal and earthy) and her peasant mom (A Simple Life star Deanie Ip). Lan helps Blackie without quite knowing what’s what, and she’s gradually drawn into the resistance, initially by spreading printed flyers.

Represented in the present by occasional black-and-white footage of a Hong Kong taxi driver who served as a runner for partisans, the local fighters were led by communist cadres, battling it out with both the Japanese and the compromised nationalists working with them. The movie doesn’t dwell on political alignments, and they matter little to people like Mrs. Fong, who is merely trying to survive the whole ordeal. Some occupiers are presented as being fat, crude, and stupid—in the manner of U.S. movies during the war—but the story isn’t simple-minded.

People of many backgrounds mingle at Shanghai-style jazz clubs, where the music is hot and the clothes are gorgeous. It turns out that Lan’s handsome boyfriend (Wallace Huo) is working for the occupiers—or is he? In fact, the young man’s Japanese boss is an expert in Chinese poetry and has a complicated attitude toward the locals. (Jim Jarmusch fans will recognize Masatoshi Nagase as the visiting poet in Paterson and the rockabilly tourist in Mystery Train.) The movie celebrates the language its characters are fighting to protect, so it’s odd that distributors chose a random title over something closer to the Mandarin original, which translates as May We Last Forever, itself taken from a thousand-year-old poem quoted several times in the story and—lasting forever in the song form—still popular wherever Chinese languages are spoken.