TORONTO - Bright Star takes its title from the John Keats poem. The Jane Campion film, a quietly brilliant depiction of the love between the Romantic poet and Fanny Brawne, a feisty young woman who lived next door, is, of course, a period piece, replete with candlelit rooms and 19th century costumes.

But as Abbie Cornish, the actress who gives Fanny her electric energy and rebellious charm, observes, there's nothing old-fashioned about the production.

"Their story is so striking and so pure and full of love and life that it gets to you and just gets under your skin," says Cornish, on the eve of the film's premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.

"Jane didn't want to get caught up in making a costume drama, per se. She wanted it to be contemporary in the sense that these were real people, real emotions. And I guess somewhere in my subconscious I was already thinking like that. . . . If you take away the house that they live in, or the clothes that they wear, or society's rules, they're still human beings with feelings, thoughts, all that sort of thing."

Ben Whishaw, looking reedy and wan, stars as Keats. There are scenes, when he's walking the Heath (Hampstead Heath, now part of London, but then the countryside beyond the city's borders), in which the English actor, with his dark hair and melancholy gaze, suggests the 1970s singer/songwriter Nick Drake. Beyond the physical resemblance, there's a spiritual kinship as well: both Keats and Drake wrote dark, beautiful verse about love, nature and worlds of fevered dreams.

"I definitely feel the parallels to people like Nick Drake and Jeff Buckley," Cornish says. "They were poets of a different era."

Bright Star, which opened Friday at the Ritz East and the Showcase at the Ritz Center/NJ, is likely to move Cornish to the A-list of actresses in their 20s. (She's 27.) After supporting turns in A Good Year (Russell Crowe's American cousin), Elizabeth: The Golden Age (Cate Blanchett's surrogate) and Stop-Loss (Ryan Phillippe's road companion - the two are now a couple in real life), Cornish's performance in Bright Star is at the center of the story. Her work is nuanced, substantive.

"I felt like every day I really had something to tackle in there," she says of the role of Fanny. "There were hard things, and you don't want to repeat beats . . . at the same time, the love between Fanny and Keats and their story seemed so clear. I really didn't have to overthink that at all. Even on paper, [the story] describes such a great evolution of their love together."

Cornish, dressed to the nines for the photographers buzzing around the festival, has just started shooting Sucker Punch, from Watchmen director Zack Snyder. It's about as far afield from Bright Star as you can get.

"It's the story of five girls in the '60s who try to escape a psych ward together - that's essentially the story, but it operates on three different levels," she explains. "There's reality, which is the psychiatric ward. Then the sub-reality, where the psych ward turns into a brothel-y, burlesque world, and then the third level is a dream world, which is where all the action happens, and that's what we've been training for - guns, swords, mixed martial arts. . . . And the the film just kind of drifts in and out of those worlds.

"I've done bits and pieces of martial arts since I was a kid, so it was nice to be able to utilize those skills, and not only utilize them but get better at them, too. . . . You definitely walk down the street and feel like if someone tried anything you'd be able to take care of them."

"Then again," Cornish adds with a laugh, "Fanny could hold her own - she was not to be intimidated. You wouldn't really want to mess with her, either."

Another 'Bright' star. "It's kind of like Jimmy Page getting ahold of one of your little demo tapes and really liking it," says Paul Schneider, the American actor, who received a call from Jane Campion one day in early 2008 asking if he would be interested in taking a look at her screenplay about John Keats and Fanny Brawne.

There was another character, Keats' friend Charles Armitage Brown, and Campion had it in her mind that Schneider - from Asheville, N.C., and a raft of American indies - could play this abrasive, bulging Scotsman.

"She was on the jury of the Venice Film Festival when she saw The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford," says Schneider, who played Dick Liddil, one of the James Gang, opposite Brad Pitt in the 2007 Western. "And I don't know how she made the leap from that character to this character, because they're just not similar, but she liked what I did. And she sent me a script. And it was amazing - now of course it's going to be amazing, because it's Jane Campion."

Schneider notes that he got into the acting biz - and into film school at the North Carolina School of the Arts - because when he was in high school he saw Campion's The Piano. And now here's the director, calling him from Australia.

"So we talked on the phone, and I told Jane that I could definitely play a frustrated artist, a frustrated writer. I mean, I'm a frustrated drummer. I just figured, 'I don't know if I've got the job or not, but I'm going to tell her everything that I think about the role.' "

And so Schneider found himself in London, with Whishaw, Cornish and Campion. He had to wear an uncomfortable plaid suit. He had to practice his Scots accent.

And he had profound self-doubts.

"Fear is a great motivator," he says, "and you just don't want to be the American that screws up this gorgeous Australian-English coproduction. If someone that you admire thinks that you can do it, well, you just tend to burn the midnight oil and make sure you don't screw things up."

'Walking' man. Filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda has won a devoted following for his inventive, humanistic films After Life and Nobody Knows. If the tone of Still Walking, playing now at the Ritz at the Bourse, is more subdued, Kore-eda's latest is nonetheless woven with similar thematic threads. These are, says the director, speaking through a translator via phone from New York, "memory, forgetting, children, and absence."

In Still Walking, in fact, it is the absence of a child - a son who died 15 years earlier - that dominates this captivating study of generational conflict in a Japanese family.

Still Walking showed last year at Toronto. This year, Kore-eda premiered a very different entry at the festival: Air Doll, about an inflatable sex doll.

"It's a fable about a doll that finds a heart and starts to move and falls in love and learns about the world," the writer and director explains. "It's a fable based on a metaphor - that she's filled with the vacuity and emptiness of modern life."

Contact movie critic Steven Rea at 215-854-5629 or srea@phillynews.com. Read his blog, "On Movies Online," at http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/onmovies/