Urban thriller We Own the Night is credible and moving

Set in New York City’s drug wars of the 1980s, We Own the Night looks like a typical urban thriller, the kind that invariably stars Matt Damon and/or Joaquin Phoenix and/or Mark Wahlberg. It is an urban thriller starring the latter two, but writer-director James Gray keeps a quiet reserve that makes the movie credible and moving. His New York is cold, dirty, and damp. His actors have ill-trimmed nails.

Phoenix plays the manager of a fancy, druggy club run by the Russian mafia. Wahlberg plays his brother, who is also a cop. Robert Duvall (grizzled, awesome) plays their dad, who is also New York’s chief of police. Family get-togethers are tense. Then the cop brother gets promoted to the narcotics squad and the bar brother is offered a cut in a big coke deal. Everything gets tenser.

The movie’s refusal to drift into shoot-’em-up histrionics keeps us believing, engaged, and on edge. The obligatory car chase is more harrowing because it’s clumsy and slow—it’s not hard to imagine yourself behind the wheel. The scene when the bar brother goes to the Russian mafia’s cocaine factory is a study in sinister details—a tattoo glimpsed through a ripped curtain, torn wallpaper, and the tip of a letter opener sticking out of a man’s sleeve.

And the performances! Phoenix and Wahlberg are fine in a manly and mumbling way, but the supporting actors make the movie: Robert Duvall’s minimalist gruffness is improbably charming. Alex Veadov plays the baddest bad guy with such placid menace that the story you hear about him at the beginning of the movie—involving a severed head and some misplaced genitals—sounds about right. He might be a fictional character, but I’m still afraid to write anything that would piss him off.

WE OWN THE NIGHT DIR. JAMES GRAY | RATED R | AT THEATERS EVERYWHERE

Tags: Film, joaquin phoenix, mark wahlberg, we own the night