Keane (15)

Portrait of a mind in meltdown

Lodge Kerrigan's Keane is an example of a curious new mini-genre of films that cling tenaciously close to a single character's collar. Indeed, it's possibly the only example, apart from the Dardenne brothers' The Son, which was virtually an extended study of the back of actor Olivier Gourmet's beefy neck; I hereby dub this new movement nape-ism.

People often think of Kerrigan as the lost man of the American independent explosion. He made his underrated debut Clean, Shaven in 1994 and Keane is only his third feature (fourth, counting one that he shot immediately before, which had to be written off entirely because the negative was damaged: he's not the luckiest film-maker). Keane, the story of a man in psychic meltdown, is a return to roots for Kerrigan, almost a companion piece to the painfully raw realism of Clean, Shaven, a study of a paranoid schizophrenic. Like that film, Keane wants to take us inside its protagonist's head, or perhaps it's more accurate to say that it takes us inside William Keane's skin. We feel his discomfort, panic, fatigue, prickly sweatiness: by the end, we virtually know how he smells. It's a smart move on Kerrigan's part to cast British actor Damian Lewis, a man whose freckled skin suggests an excess of static electricity, and whose collarbone goes a raw red when he's hot.

Keane is first seen hovering anxiously at New York's crowded Port Authority bus terminal, asking passersby whether they remember seeing a young girl: his daughter, lost in the crowd and apparently abducted six months earlier. Muttering to himself, in a state of acute, panicked alertness, Keane scans the location, trying to reconstruct the child's disappearance. He takes a bus, thinks he spots something, yells to be let out, then grabs at an anorak that somehow he's detected in the city landscape. His antennae constantly twitch for clues, but we sense that none of them can possibly mean anything: his daughter is lost, and so (irreparably, it seems) is any coherence in Keane's life.

Stay close to Keane long enough, listen to his muttering (and you do have to listen, much of his speech hovering just a notch above subliminal) and you realise that we're given ample ground to question what we're told. Perhaps Keane lost his grip on life because he stopped watching his daughter for a moment, and never saw her again; maybe he'd already lost his grip and wanted to lose her in the crowd; or perhaps her disappearance is all a delusion. Keane's current existence is all contradiction: he's staying in a flophouse, seemingly on the skids, but he also has money to buy cocaine and to go to a nightclub, where he's functional enough to get into a clinch with an attractive young woman (even though the moment, filmed claustrophobically in a cramped toilet, ends disastrously). Who knows what's really happening in his life? In one of the film's few still moments, Keane sits down and calmly talks himself through his own biography, as if stocktaking his remnants of identity.

Keane has literally wandered off the straight track: we see him where he shouldn't be, huddled on a grass bank between motorway lanes, wandering into a traffic tunnel. He freaks out in a bar, in a scene that recalls the threatening intensity of Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant. He returns to Port Authority at night, acting out his own private paranoid thriller, convinced his daughter's abductor is nearby and watching him.

Then Keane seems to settle into a calm lucidity. He befriends Lynn (Amy Ryan), a young woman in dire straits, and her seven-year-old daughter Kira (Abigail Breslin, the sombre child from Little Miss Sunshine) who are staying at his hotel. Perhaps "befriend" isn't the right word - he's effectively stalking them, infiltrating himself into their lives - but being around them seems to bring some stability.

Keane gets to play a paternal role to Kira, and he proves a natural. Of course, we worry about where the relationship is leading - we know Keane is unpredictable - but we're scared for him, as much as of him. The final act is nerve-racking, and its conclusion strangely abrupt. As with the Dardennes's films' endings, we don't quite know whether the narrative has reached a natural conclusion or been cut off arbitrarily; and that uncertainty is eminently true to life.

Nervy, fragmented editing evokes Keane's experience of being lost in a disconnected succession of moments, and shooting in harsh grain, director of photography John Foster achieves an acutely uncomfortable intimacy. The film evokes solitude and desperation like few that I can recall. Lewis is on screen practically every second - Keane being the inescapable centre of his own cell-like universe - and his performance is magnetically troubling. Photographed so close, every look, every emotional shift counts. He's also miked up close: we hear every mumble as Keane recounts his private running narrative of pain and confusion. If Kerrigan flouts the dramatic law that you should never have a character think aloud ("I gotta get some sleep, get some rest"), it's because the protective membrane has collapsed between Keane's mind and his actions.

Lewis plays Keane like a radio tuned between stations, trying to find a coherent signal but mainly picking up his own inner cacophony. It makes sense that the film is being released in a tie-in with Samaritans: Keane is a sympathetic, revealing exploration of an area of experience that most of us, mercifully, never have to endure. It's a mesmerising piece, one of the great American films of recent years.

j.romney@independent.co.uk