Paul Mescal, Josh O'Connor find love and song in 'The History of Sound,' a WWI romance

“What if your first love is your greatest love — and your last love?” That is the question at the heart of “The History of Sound,” the new historical romantic drama starring Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor.

“What if your first love is your greatest love — and your last love?” That is the question at the heart of “The History of Sound,” the new historical romantic drama starring Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor, which premieres Friday in theaters.

Directed by Oliver Hermanus and adapted by writer Ben Shattuck from his own short story of the same name, the film explores the impact of a fleeting romance between Lionel (Mescal) and David (O’Connor), two Boston Conservatory music students who meet at a piano bar in 1917 — where Lionel overhears David singing a song from his youth — and quickly fall for each other. Several years later, after serving in World War I, David asks Lionel to join him on an impromptu trip through the backwoods of Maine to collect traditional folk songs in order to preserve them for future generations.

“What I find so interesting about the film is it’s not that trope of, man walks into a bar, looks across the bar, sees somebody who he fancies, and they fall in love. It’s the opposite. You see the back of David’s head, and you see the back of Lionel’s head, and the script explained to us that these are two people who met through sound,” Mescal told NBC News in a joint interview with O’Connor. “It’s not one of physical chemistry, initially; it’s one of intellectual and artistic chemistry.”

O’Connor described the characters’ relationship as an “outward-looking” romance and said he was drawn to the way “their entire relationship is seeking other stuff to add to it.”

“The adventure that they go on is all about inviting other people into their world,” he said. “It’s a very selfless romance in that sense, so I think that was something that I hadn’t seen in a film before, and that felt really a different way of telling a love story.”