Barry plays his Baltimore blues

This Thursday, the National Film Theatre welcomes Barry Levinson and his new film, Liberty Heights. Levinson was born in Baltimore in 1942. It doesn't often matter much where an American film-maker comes from. Sooner or later, he picks up the patina of New York or Los Angeles. He's taken out of the real world, because Hollywood doesn't want him to be local or authentic. It prefers the notion that all films take place in some sleek, unstable never-never land.

This Thursday, the National Film Theatre welcomes Barry Levinson and his new film, Liberty Heights. Levinson was born in Baltimore in 1942. It doesn't often matter much where an American film-maker comes from. Sooner or later, he picks up the patina of New York or Los Angeles. He's taken out of the real world, because Hollywood doesn't want him to be local or authentic. It prefers the notion that all films take place in some sleek, unstable never-never land.

Yet Levinson has now made four films - Diner (1982), Tin Men (1987), Avalon (1990) and Liberty Heights - that are tributes to his working-class city. Diner may not have seemed like the start of such a vocation. In 1982, it was a funny coming-of-age story in which a bunch of friends hanging out at the same diner through the late 1950s are introduced to work and women.

But Diner had Truffaut's warm touch with young people, and it introduced a band of young actors who repaid their first-time director's trust: Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, Mickey Rourke, Kevin Bacon, Paul Reiser and Ellen Barkin. Tin Men also felt like a self-sufficient comedy, set in 1963, about a partnership in the aluminium siding business between Richard Dreyfuss and Danny DeVito. The two actors were so broad in style that the film seemed to be more about comic schtick than city life.

Avalon (1990) was the turning point, and a personal indulgence only permitted by Levinson's success with mainstream pictures like Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) and Rain Man (1988). For the first time, he sought to portray Jewish immigrant life and the family under all the American pressures known as prosperity, happiness and homogeneity. No longer focused on just the young generation, Avalon also featured Joan Plowright, Armin Mueller-Stahl and Lou Jacobi as Baltimore people who had had to learn more than a new language.

Liberty Heights seems to me the best of the quartet. But it is also the most detached and panoramic, taking in many different human stories and turning its attention to black-white and Jewish-goy relationships. If Levinson shares the feeling that this may be his best work then it must have been painful to see how easily the picture was ignored in America, because the story seemed so slight.

For there's another Levinson who is regarded as commercially reliable. This man got a directing nomination for Bugsy (1991); actually won the director Oscar for Rain Man; and made plenty of money with Good Morning, Vietnam, Tin Men and Disclosure (1994), his cheerfully vulgar version of the Michael Crichton novel in which Demi Moore sexually harasses Michael Douglas. No one had to take the last very seriously but it was well done by mainstream standards. Bugsy was an intelligent portrait of a shy mobster who also fancied himself as a movie star, and a witty account of the formative days of Las Vegas. Good Morning, Vietnam was one of the most successful Robin Williams vehicles, and Rain Man impressed everyone for the way it handled a steadily changing screenplay and a quirky, temperamental star (Dustin Hoffman).

There were failures along the way. Despite his love and knowledge of baseball, Levinson couldn't make The Natural (1984) work. Toys (1992)was also a box-office disaster, though it was a project Levinson had nursed along for many years.

Still, no one seemed to doubt his touch - or his energy. In the 1990s, Levinson also turned his hand to help producing pictures for other directors - like Wilder Napalm (1993, but not released in the UK) and Donnie Brasco (1996) - and he was co-executive producer (with Tom Fontana) on the TV series, Homicide: Life on the Street. This was a tough, police procedural series, filmed realistically but innovatively, and set in Baltimore. Though its ratings never went too high, it won awards and critical praise. It used unlikely actors, and it had a harsh awareness of race and urban poverty. There were those who thought it made many of Levinson's movies feel artificial.

At the same time ( Homicide started in 1993), he seemed to lose his sureness with theatrical films: between Bugsy and Liberty Heights, for instance, he made Jimmy Hollywood (1994), Disclosure , Sleepers (1996), Sphere (1997) and Wag the Dog (1997). Now Wag the Dog was very funny, and I liked the offbeat Jimmy Hollywood - especially the way it reduced Hollywood to a Baltimore suburb. But there's a crisis in Levinson's career between the films he knows he ought to make (every now and then) and those he really lives to do. It's a puzzle he's created, but in solving it he has the chance to reveal himself.

'Liberty Heights' (15) opens on Friday; Barry Levinson is interviewed at the NFT (020 7928 3232), Thursday