Destroyer review: Nicole Kidman gives one of her strongest performances in contrived cop film

The Australian actor channels her inner Lee Marvin for Karyn Kusama's hardboiled thriller

Director: Karyn Kusama; Starring: Nicole Kidman, Toby Kebbell, Tatiana Maslany, Sebastian Stan, Scoot McNairy, Bradley Whitford. Cert 15, 121 mins

Nicole Kidman continues to defy audience expectations. A few weeks ago, she turned up out of the sea, washed up on shore, as the beautiful, mermaid-like underwater queen, Atlanna, in superhero film Aquaman. In Karyn Kusama’s LA-set modern-day film noir, she makes an equally startling entrance but couldn’t look more different. Kidman is playing Erin Bell, an LAPD detective haunted by events long in the past.

Bell is first seen in her car, opening her eyes. She is puffy faced and hungover. She has the stumbling gait of a hobo. Her colleagues look at her with undisguised disdain when she arrives at the scene of a homicide, and advise her to go and lie down. “You look terrible,” her old commanding officer tells her.

This is a film with a storyline as fractured and complicated as that of John Boorman’s Point Blank. The novelty is that Kidman is playing the equivalent of the Lee Marvin role. Destroyer is one of the few hardboiled gangster movies in recent times with a female protagonist. Director Kusama and Kidman relish giving a fresh spin to a very familiar genre. If Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum can portray jaded, cynical cops, so can Kidman.

A mysterious figure called Silas (Toby Kebbell in Charles Manson mode) is back in town, released early from a prison sentence. He is the key to the mystery. In flashbacks, we slowly discover the links between Bell and Silas. Years before, she and a fellow officer, Chris (Sebastian Stan), went undercover and infiltrated Silas’ gang. What happened then has left her life in near ruins now.

Kusama makes excellent use of familiar LA settings: the freeways, viaducts, shopping malls and houses in the hills that you find in so many thrillers set in the city. She stages the heists in a way which echoes scenes in films like Michael Mann’s Heat in which the thieves are professional, ruthless and strangely casual. The action plays out in the blazing Californian sunlight but we are never in doubt about the dark thoughts tormenting Bell.

The screenplay, by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi, not only leaps back and forth in time but switches between Bell’s police work and her private life. She has a teenage daughter, Shelby (Jade Pettyjohn) who can’t stand her. As we learn more and more about Silas and his gang, we discover the reasons why Shelby so resents her mother. Bell, in turn, can’t stand Shelby’s delinquent boyfriend. It all makes for extreme domestic disharmony.

At times, the storytelling strains credibility. Bell may be battered and bruised, suffering from a seemingly permanent hangover and in a weak physical state, but she can still keep up with suspects and hold her own in the fight scenes.

The final section of the film has some jaw-dropping revelations. For these to work, the filmmakers have to withhold vital information, which means there are gaps in the narrative. Bell’s status with the LAPD isn’t fully explained either. The incident which left her an emotional wreck happened long ago but she still has her badge and appears to be on the payroll.

The plotting here is contrived. Some of the visual devices (for example, the ink stained bank notes which keep on turning up in unexpected places) are heavy handed. Kidman’s acting, though, has a rawness and a ferocious honesty about it. The film may be flawed and uneven but it provides a platform for its ever-versatile star to give one of her strongest and least characteristic performances.