Mr. Nolfi has made assorted, um, adjustments to the original story — David’s world doesn’t disintegrate, it pauses like a stuck clock — though his largest shift is turning a metaphysical speculation into an existential crisis. After bombing out of the political game David enters into business with his old campaign manager, Charlie (Michael Kelly, who could be Eliot Spitzer’s cousin). Then one strange day David stumbles into a boardroom crowded with immobilized colleagues and busily moving strangers, some wearing gray suits, others dressed in more menacing black. He tries to flee but is caught by the interlopers, one of whom, Richardson (John Slattery), explains that by meeting Elise, David is not following their plan. Like any sane person he responds by trying to make a run for it again, but that’s not in their plan either.

The detour that Elise inadvertently forces David down is not to the strangers’ liking, a situation that leads to tricky, niftily staged cat-and-mouse chase scenes involving some amusing creative geography. But David is as much a captive to Elise as a fugitive from those meddlesome strangers, and he’s also caught between seemingly contradictory forces: his ambition and his heart. In other words, despite the title, the film is less a freak-out about the nature of existence (the world of ash that Dick wrote about) and more about a struggle for love, a more familiar (at the movies), if essential, fight. Whether running or kissing or running and kissing (well, almost), Mr. Damon and Ms. Blunt turn romance into a palpable race.

If Mr. Nolfi doesn’t go deep in “The Adjustment Bureau,” drilling down to where it hurts (he would rather entertain than pain you), he skates on the gray-blue surfaces of his film with confidence. Along with his likable, confidently sexy leads and an excellent troika in Mr. Slattery, Anthony Mackie and Terence Stamp, Mr. Nolfi keeps the film balanced between sincerity and self-conscious amusement, rarely faltering in tone. With their cool-cat hats and tailored suits, Mr. Mackie, Mr. Slattery and Mr. Stamp look as if they’re on hiatus from Mr. Slattery’s AMC show, “Mad Men” (or extras in “North by Northwest”). Like Mr. Damon and Ms. Blunt they can bring you into this world because Mr. Nolfi never takes his eye off the human stakes.