Who are you? When? Where? Some movies will tell you, and so well that at the end, you feel like you’ve lived another lifetime by swimming in someone’s memories. After watching “The Deer Hunter,” you will feel like you’ve been in a bamboo cage, floating with an inch of air above a river filled with rats. You will feel like the man with the rotting tracks tarring one arm and a one-bullet revolver to one temple.

Coming in at more than three hours, starring young Robert DeNiro, Christopher Walken and Meryl Streep, and shot in real old American manufacturing towns and real Southeast Asian countries, at a time when you didn’t make feature films about Vietnam, “The Deer Hunter” would have been a great movie about the joyous, naive prelude to a group of young men’s trip overseas, and how darkness creeps in regardless. It would have been a great movie about the brutality of war, and how love and tenderness can survive, even though it may be shell-shocked, even with blood in its mouth.

This is one of the finest war movies, one of the finest movies about friendship, one of the finest movies about America, one of the finest movies about strength and fragility that has ever been made.

Its people live hard, poor lives of smoke stacks, drunken driving and grueling work. The only lovely day of their lives might just be a traditional wedding in the Russian Orthodox church. They’ll be back the next Monday at the steel mill, with heavy hoods and bubbling brooks of molten lava rushing by their feet, headed to cheap trailer homes, but they’ll be happy about it. They grew up there. Their friends are there. They want to have families there someday. These are the last few days of waning childhood, where they can fall into a big American car, push the pedal to the floor, tumble into their buddy’s bar, spray beer on each other and play pool and sing oldies and head to the Pennsylvania mountains at dawn to try getting a buck with just one shot.

The future already is not bright. It’s the late 60s. The steel mills have yet to shutter. The love affairs have yet to crumble in alcohol and poverty. The cancer has yet to be diagnosed. The war has yet to kill the boys who were so happy throwing bologna sandwiches at each other, drunkenly dipping a Twinkie in mustard. They’re in the woods, Walken musing, “I like the way the trees are.” They’re at an all-night, glorious wedding, and Streep has just caught the bouquet, surprised. DeNiro hikes silently into the woods with his Winchester model 70, an extension of himself.

“The Deer Hunter” has, to steal a phrase from the legendary Walter Murch on storytelling, “more dimensionality than you can ever cope with.” There’s not enough room here to tell you enough about the pigs in Vietnam arguing over scraps, the Russian Roulette, the desperate fall from the helicopter into the leg-shattering river, the way Streep holds a sweater she knit for her man, Walken, up to DeNiro and dissolves in smalltalk: “Too big. Whoops. Well, I could fix that, though. I mean — One thing about wool, it’s really a cinch… to fix.” Like it was her heart, and her responsibility was just to make an alteration.

We mourn — for the war, for the heartbreak, and for the time in America when the working class could afford to get an old Cadillac and laugh and celebrate beautiful weddings and spray beer and raise a family on a factory pay. We despair for the same reason Bruce Springsteen did. We despair to see people die before our eyes, even before they get a bullet in the brain. We despair, because, like the group of post-wedding hunters on the eve of their nightmare in Vietnam, we’ve arrived somewhere, gotten out of the car at the top of the mountain, blinking in the sun, ready to hunt, and say to each other a desperate, absurd, wishing thing: “This is not it. Definitely.” “They changed it.” “No kidding.” “Somehow they changed it.” There’s no choice at that point. Whatever it is, you continue, and you go and finish it.

Ashley O’Dell reviews movies that aren’t in theaters anymore.