This might be regarded as a story of creation. Not ‘the’ creation but a creation of a Garden of Eden, by a man named Jack (Daniel Day-Lewis), just off the East Coast of the U.S. Once the site of an experiment in communal living, back in the ‘70s, Jack now lives a more or less self-sustainable life here with his guileless 16-year-old daughter, Rose (luminous newcomer Camilla Belle).

It’s 1986 and they grow their own food and generate electrical power with windmills. Isolated, the island offers no social interaction with anyone other than her father for Rose, except for periodic visits by Gray (Jason Lee), who supplies them with plants for Rose’s lush flower garden. Jack spends a lot of time trying to stop the building of luxury homes by developer Marty Rance (Beau Bridges), on property bordering his land. Sometimes Jack’s tactics include gunfire, not what you’d expect from a charter member of the flower power generation. Jack is also dying of heart disease.

The commune failed after a few years and Rose’s mother left when she was three. We get a glimpse of perhaps why these things happened as Jack’s need to control is revealed. It may be easier to be idealistic when one has the inherited wealth to exercise that control, as Jack does; from building the commune and this presumed paradise to buying his mainland girlfriend Kathleen’s (Catherine Keener from "Lovely and Amazing") companionship.

As he feels his health slipping away, Jack invites Kathleen to move to the island, to help him and care for Rose. Kathleen has two teenaged sons. Wry, self-conscious and overweight Rodney (Ryan McDonald) hides his girth within a jacket, and he and Rose immediately connect. Not in the way she angles for originally, as she tests her first foray into sexuality. Sullen, hollow eyed Thadius (Paul Dano) is more accommodating, and brings a creep factor to the household, which is surprisingly matched by a jealous Rose, who exacts a startling revenge on her father.

This Eden comes complete with a snake and forbidden passion. Writer-director Rebecca Miller ("Personal Velocity," and daughter of the late playwright Arthur Miller) says she is "…interested in how Jack had come from having a commune to having almost no interaction with anyone except his daughter." He is fierce with his control and is blown away by his loss of it when his fallibility with his daughter is revealed.

Headed by a gaunt and always worth watching Daniel Day-Lewis ¾ "Gangs of New York," and he shed over 40 pounds for this role¾ the cast is superb. Day-Lewis is Miller’s husband. Catherine Keener strikes just the right chord of neediness as the put upon Kathleen. The younger actors, including Belle, McDonald, Dano and Jena Malone as Red Berry, Thadius’s Goth-waif girlfriend, capture the loneliness of youth that often parent themselves.

"The Ballad of Jack and Rose" deals with letting go. Jack must let go of the idea of a society of communal cooperation where, oddly, he is not willing to compromise. Rose lets go to grow into her own life.

At times a bit overwrought with metaphor, this is still a film well worth seeing.