Login form in popup

My recommendation would be to use a plug-in like Lightbox Plus to power your link. Clicking the link would load your standard login form inside a lightbox. You could then automatically redirect to the same page so that, once logged in, users can leave a comment.

Basically, you’d dynamically build your link to be something link this:

<a href="http://yoursite.com/wp-login.php?redirect_to=http%3A%2F%2Fyoursite.com%2Fpostname" 
   rel="lightbox[login-form]" 
   title="Please login to comment">Login to Comment</a>

This would load the login form in a lightbox and set it to redirect to the post upon successful authentication. This might be all you need, but I haven’t tested it … so give it a try and, if needed, add some other scripts to reload the page upon successful login.