25th Hour (15)

Meanwhile, back at the centre of the universe, something stirs...

It was only to be expected that after 11 September, Hollywood would be plunged into panicky denial, and that the twin towers would be hurriedly erased from Manhattan's movie skyline as well as its real one. But now that American cinema is at last settling into a post-catastrophe sense of the real, who better to inaugurate that new climate than Spike Lee? After all, more than most US film-makers, he's always been compelled to look unpleasant truths in the eye.

The opening credits of 25th Hour show Manhattan at night dominated by the sheaves of blue light commemorating the towers' destruction. It comes across as a bold, confident declaration: this is a city scarred by the recent past but a city whose history, and cinema, begin again now. One of the characters has a downtown flat directly overlooking Ground Zero, and peering down from his window at night is a sobering experience: the pit, with bulldozers smoothing over the debris, resembles an expanse of gradually healing scar tissue.

Yet inevitably such imagery also seems like a gesture of self-importance, and 25th Hour lacks the extremes – sometimes invigorating, sometimes hectoring – of Lee's most urgent films, and after the frenzied provocation of his blackface satire Bamboozled, it looks downright genteel. It certainly appears, at first glance, like an impersonal project: the script isn't by Lee, but adapted by young hotshot David Benioff from his own novel, and features a predominantly white cast in a story of privileged Manhattanites and their angst. Yet 25th Hour unmistakably bears Lee's stamp, both stylistically – criss-crossing between nerve-end dynamism and leaden sobriety – and in the general air of peevishness that often marks his work even when he's ostensibly enjoying his material.

Hero Monty Brogan, played by Edward Norton, is a wealthy drug dealer from a blue-collar background, the son of an Irish ex-fireman (Brian Cox). Monty had everything – looks, love, prep school scholarship – but now he's due to report for an extended prison term. The film is set on his last day in New York – that is to say, to all intents and purposes, his last day on earth. He spends it with his best buddies (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Barry Pepper) and his Puerto Rican girlfriend Naturelle (Rosario Dawson), who may conceivably have snitched on him.

There's a palpable sense of nerviness and imminent doom hanging over the occasion, partly because everyone's fully aware what lies in store for Monty, who knows he'll emerge – as Benioff's pithy script puts it – "a 38-year-old ex-con with government-issue dentures". The others have horrors awaiting them too. Pepper's arrogant car-crash of a man, with his pile of neuroses and scrunched Kirk Douglas profile, is messing up at work, while English teacher Jacob (Hoffman) is infatuated with a litigious student (Anna Paquin) who seems to be hitting on him for better grades: the second we see her, we know she's his perdition on wheels.

What most scares Monty, however, is the prospect awaiting him as a handsome young man in the prison showers. The way he harps on about this makes him considerably less sympathetic than he's apparently meant to be; he comes across as craven, narcissistic and masochistically obsessive. That may have less to do with the realities of Monty's career as a heroin dealer than with Edward Norton, one of the most humourless, self-important leads in Hollywood, who behaves on screen as though his very presence imbued a film with noble purpose (God help us if he ever co-stars with Tim Robbins).

Some of the longer scenes drag narcoleptically. When 25th Hour jumps, it's largely thanks to Rodrigo Prieto's harsh, sweaty photography and to Barry Alexander Brown's editing, crackling with jump cuts. There are some wonderfully watchable performances: Hoffman and Pepper's moodily incongruous double act, Paquin's compelling brattishness and Rosario Dawson's rangy, tender (and appropriately natural) Naturelle. But the biggest performance in Lee films always comes in the direction, when the man allows himself a big rhetorical moment. In 25th Hour it comes in the form of Brogan's litany of hate to New York City, community by community: Sikhs, Pakistanis, Korean grocers, gay men in Chelsea, Russians in Brighton Beach, the corrupt suits of Enron. Jesus Christ and Osama Bin Laden are not spared; neither is Brogan himself.

The picture is of a city fuelled by impatience and rage that can turn to tenderness at the drop of a hat: Monty's hate-objects flash up in a grotesque montage, but later their smiling faces glide past him, as he realises how much he'll miss them. This is impassioned film-making, and probably says something very true about New Yorkers' feelings towards their city, and about the troubled co-dependency between its communities. But it also suggests that Lee – even if he is channelling them through Brogan's self-pitying rage – relishes his stereotypes far too much. He still can't resist such nasty cartoons as a Hassidic diamond merchant: this after upbraiding Hollywood for its history of black caricatures in Bamboozled.

The film ends with a vivid imagining of the life Monty could have lived – or might yet live – far from the city, somewhere in the sprawling wilderness of who knows where. This is at once a clever representation of, and a symptom of, the way New York regards its tiny patch as the centre of the universe. This is a hymn to New Yorkers' compulsion to live looking disaster in the face, or at least to walk and talk it as if they were. But in the end we get a sense of a city whose own narcissism remains untamed by disaster. Self-consciously magnificent, intermittently compelling, 25th Hour is rarely affecting. Lee has made some great films about the racial divide in America, but 25th Hour is, in a peculiar way, about another divide: between New York and the rest of America. Monty's litany may say, "Fuck New York", but really it feels as if he's saying fuck everywhere but.

j.romney@independent.co.uk