In this crime drama, Robert Duvall plays Burt Grusinsky, a district police chief in New York City, circa 1988. One of Grusinsky’s two sons, Joseph (Mark Wahlberg), has followed in his father’s footsteps and is now one of the most respected cops in the city. The other son, Bobby (Joaquin Phoenix), who has hidden his identity by changing his last name to Green, moves through night life with ease and assurance. He has a drug habit, and manages a successful nightclub owned by Marat Buzhayev (Moni Moshonov), suspected head of a Russian gang that controls the local drug traffic.

The brothers collide when Bobby’s club is raided by the police as part of a drug crackdown, and Buzhayev’s nephew, Vadim (Alex Veadov), is caught in the act. Though Bobby himself does not deal drugs, he had been asked by Vadim to join the gang. The police can’t convict him, but Bobby is hauled off to jail anyway. There, his father asks him to spy on the drug operation and report what goes down. "We’ll watch your back," he promises.

That sounds like the plot of almost any fast-paced cop flick these days, but We Own the Night is different. It depends heavily on character development, and its examination of the relationships between fathers and sons and brothers. The trailers misrepresent the film with a lot of action and quick cutting. The fact that most of the film is actually devoted to dialogue makes what action there is all the more exciting -- those scenes burst in like intruders on our thoughts and understanding of the Grusinskys.

Robert Duvall has never turned in a bad performance, and here he is on the mark again, stalwart and unshakable as patriarch and chief. Wahlberg is excellent in his all-American tough-boy mode, defining the world in black and white with no shades of gray, as Burt has taught Joseph to do. Phoenix is amazing as Bobby. The development of his character arc is one of the transformation of a questionable bad guy into a hero. Phoenix’s subtle work here might seem like under-acting to some, but it is just an approach that makes this transformation believable, despite some plot holes.

The other characters are clearly good or bad and remain so, with little else in between. Keeping his feet firmly planted in that assumption, director James Gray indulges himself in several implausibilities to make his point. For instance: In a tight-knit community, how could Bobby have successfully hidden his identity? Gray ignores this sort of problem, and probably you will too, as you’re swept away by his atmospheric approach. The result is an intense film experience that offers a genuinely cathartic transformation while making no apologies for its directness. The conclusion of the film seems simple but it blew me away, because the characters said what I’d been wanting them to say for an hour. When they finally do, they speak without embarrassment, simply and directly.

Though I can’t put my finger directly on why, sometimes this film seemed European. The camera angles are very inventive. In a major confrontation between two characters, the camera jumps to show the vast emptiness of the industrial neighborhood, the two men tiny as ants in the lower-right corner of the frame. There are also overhead shots, and all of the different angles make sense. But I noticed them because I don’t see them in most American films. The score, by Polish composer Wojciech Kilar, who wrote the music for Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, is about as far as you can get from the bombast of, say, Hans Zimmer or Harry Gregson-Williams.

If you’re looking for two hours of solid entertainment and suspense that will have you caring about the characters on the screen while giving you a different view of a familiar topic, you can’t go wrong with We Own the Night.

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