Now we mourn for young men from other towns. The dead are not only from our neighborhoods. Now the young dead come from places named Mobile and Smithville and Hobart, from Lee, Fla., and Brazoria, Tex., and La Harpe, Ill. They too are mourned by their lacerated families and the people they loved. They too leave aching voids among their comrades who remain among the living.

In a way, a new movie is also about them, although it appears to be about what Sept. 11 did to us in New York, to our 343 dead firefighters, to our dead policemen, to all the others who perished on that savage morning. The movie is called "The Guys." It opens tomorrow. It was directed by Jim Simpson and stars Sigourney Weaver and Anthony LaPaglia.

And when you watch the movie unfold, in an opening sequence in grainy black-and-white video, as a fireman lolls casually outside the firehouse on a peaceful New York morning, you are thrown back again. Back to the minutes before the world did, in fact, change forever.

That lone fireman, like all the rest of us, did not know that Mohamed Atta and his fanatical associates were already aiming a hijacked airliner at the North Tower. Nobody then knew that the dying was about to begin. Nobody yet knew the names of Nassiriya or Basra or Najaf.

But the movie is not a dated reconstruction of the terrible, now-familiar events of Sept. 11. It's about something even more powerfully human: the need to give those lost lives meaning through the use of language. LaPaglia plays a captain in the FDNY (named simply Nick). He has lost men under his command, among the many lost that morning from all over the city. He is faced with a dreadful duty: to deliver eulogies for each of them. For all of his love for those men, for all of his own intelligence and heart, he doesn't feel up to the task.

He seeks out a writer named Joan, played by Weaver, a woman who lives in the neighborhood, and he asks for her help. At first he is so full of raw, turbulent emotion, inexpressible sorrow, the guilt of the survivor, he can't make himself clear. Joan, too, feels inadequate, but she slowly draws from Nick the essence of each of those men. Nick speaks. Joan types. And together they discover that eulogy is not about the way those men died, but how they lived.

Both resist the slippery language that comes so easily to politicians, all those airy abstractions we are now hearing about the young British and American dead. Neither can be satisfied by buttering one off-the-rack hunk of oratory to another. Neither can surrender to glib platitudes. The movie grows out of a one-act play written just after 9/11 for Simpson's downtown Flea Theater by Columbia University journalism Prof. Anne Nelson. She used her own experience of working with an unnamed fire captain to write about the search for true remembrance. And memory must be personal and concrete or it's a vast meaningless blur.

Along the way, Nick educates Joan. In their relationship, he is the true teacher. He opens for her a world that she had never examined, walking as she did so blithely past firehouses, concerned more about her children than theirs, about the complexities of her own life, while failing to even think about the firemen.

He makes their lives real to her: the sense of the unit, the small community of laughter, food, music too, and of dancing. Yes, dancing. For Nick loves to dance. He is among the bravest of men, but he speaks of the wordless grace of dancing, of the mysteries of the tango, of its power too. In his way, which is increasingly articulate, he is giving Joan his own version of Andre Gide's line: Do not understand me too quickly.

The merits of "The Guys" as a movie are best left to the critics, of course. But for me it's a means of ensuring that we don't ever forget what happened to so many of us on that bright September morning. Not simply the dead, but the living too. That day is not our past; it remains our present, to be carried with us for the rest of our lives. Its wounds might never heal.

"Everybody's afraid," says Nick at one point. "They just never admit it."

And surely that is true today of all those young Americans in the sandy towns of Iraq. In one of the black-and-white sequences of "The Guys," we see pages of a newspaper drift through the grainy air, like a symbol of fleeting time. In a way, it seems to say that all language is inadequate to express grief. But this movie, through the power of art, says the opposite. We can remember. We will remember. We must remember.