Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s “The Lives of Others” is most captivating when the administrative sterility of the communist state cracks to reveal a sliver of human empathy. Like an epistolary novel, the screenplay feels as if it has been reconstructed from documents. The film suggests that even in the circles of bureaucratic hell there lurks, in the hearts of a few strays, a capacity for empathy.

Ulrich Mühe is Wiesler (evoking “weasel”), a brilliant spy and interrogator for the Stasi. His face, blank with starvation for human contact, recalls Robert Duvall in “THX-1138” as he observes the intellectual and moral quandaries facing a certain Dreyman, a dissident writer in the GDR. Key to the film is Dreyman’s belief that no one who has heard Beethoven—truly heard him—can be a bad person. The longer Wiesler spies on Dreyman, listening in, the more he longs for a personal bond the state forbids.

Precisely this emphasis on listening and empathy makes “The Lives of Others” profoundly moving as a document of communism’s last years. We are reminded that human beings inhabited these broken states. Fine performances and taut direction combine to depict surprising ways in which real lives intersect on the pages of state directives and the fates of actual people are rapped out on party typewriters.

Yet its more general themes fit too neatly into formulaic humanism. “The Lives of Others” softly asserts gentleness, sensitivity, and artistic freedom as its ideals. The filmmakers nourish all the usual cultish ideas about the sanctity of artists and the indomitability of the human spirit. The idealism feels misplaced in an otherwise tough-minded movie which opens with a torture interrogation coolly described in a university lecture.

Happily, von Donnersmarck eschewed a violent or sensationalistic ending. The climactic recognition between the two men is handled beautifully. Neither man actually makes eye contact with the other and years pass before the secret is known to them both. It is a fascinating character study and a paean to the kindness of strangers, demonstrating how slipstreams of grace can survive even in the most machinelike institutions. These are timely themes for our present, when our own life-and-death struggles are slowly dissolving into bureaucratic abstractions.