It is this writer’s pleasure to announce that Scott Cooper’s new gangster flick Black Mass is an intelligent and strongly-made crime drama that does not prostrate itself before the gangster classics of the past.

Okay, so let’s get a few things out of the way first.

This is an excellent use of and a terrific performance from Mr. Johnny Depp. Depp’s rut in the past few years has been easy to see, but after seeing Black Mass, it is harder to diagnose. It’s not that Depp is doing anything categorically different here, because in most ways, he’s not. Yes, he playing a “real person,” and not an immortal vampire, a Wonderland-dwelling hatter, or whatever the fuck was going on in Mortdecai. But he doesn’t play notorious Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger like a real person. With just as much makeup as he was under in Sweeney Todd or The Lone Ranger, Depp plays Whitey as a monstrous, barely human fiend, a grotesque figure that seems to cross James Cagney with Lon Chaney.

We never really know what makes Whitey tic. Family psychology doesn’t seem to be the issue — Whitey’s a lifelong criminal, his younger brother a state senator, and their mother seems normal enough — nor is it a time-and-place issue, really. While there’s much talk of Southie this, and Southie that, Cooper’s version of South Boston doesn’t feel all that different from many other blue collar neighborhoods. And the signs of time appear to be limited to the clothing choices — the Boston busing crises of the ’70s don’t appear, and the IRA only exists to be one more Bulger arms deal.

No, Depp’s Bulger isn’t really a person, he’s more like a rainstorm. Is there a reason why rainstorms happen? Yes. Is there much you can do about it? Not really. All you can do is react to it. Maybe you brought an umbrella. Maybe you don’t have an umbrella, and you’ve got to scrounge around for a newspaper to hold over your head. Or maybe you catch pneumonia and drop dead 24 hours later. The rainstorm doesn’t care. The rainstorm doesn’t notice.

But when he’s on screen, Depp completely holds your attention, with Whitey’s voice and body language and expression all serving as an offensive weapon designed to bore under the skin of friend, family, and foe alike. There will not be a lot of talk about the “family secret” scene — part of the film’s trailer — where Whitey intimidates a corrupt FBI agent by berating him about how easily he gave away a recipe, but for me, another scene was even better. It’s a scene between Whitey and his girlfriend Lindsay (Dakota Johnson). In the scene, the two lovers console one another in a difficult time until Lindsay says that she’d mercifully “pull the plug” in regards to their seriously sick son. Whitey reacts with instant disgust. That’s his son, too. This is a betrayal, he more-or-less says, and that’s apparently the one thing he can’t stand.

But for all of his talk of hating betrayal and getting rid of traitors, it is Whitey himself who is perhaps the biggest traitor of them all. By the time this scene happens, Whitey’s already agreed to become an FBI informant, while insisting he’s “nawt a rat.” So even the scene that should be key to understanding Whitey’s character — the tragic loss of a young child — is in fact just another piece of the puzzle. Whitey loathes betrayals and takes part in betrayal. He badmouths drug use but introduces drugs to schoolkids. Depp can’t reasonably reveal these inner workings of the character, because such inner workings are perhaps beyond reasonable human understanding. Bruce Springsteen’s chilling song “Nebraska,” told from the point-of-view of 1950s spree killer Charles Starkweather, waiting to be strapped into the electric chair, ends with these lines:
“They declared me unfit to live, said into that great void my soul’d be hurled.
You want to know why I did what I did?
Sir, I guess there’s just a meanness in this world.”

And I think the film’s view of Whitey Bulger is something like that. Why he did what he did is a darkness somewhere on the edge of the world, beyond Boston Harbor, for sure, or perhaps underneath all of it.

So, Depp’s Whitey Bulger is worth the price of admission. But what about the rest of the cast? I was concerned going into the movie about putting Joel Edgerton and Benedict Cumberbatch in key roles. Not meaning to impugn their acting ability, but an Australian and a posh Brit as a pair of working class South Boston boys seemed like odd casting, not to mention that one of my biggest problems with modern American gangster movies is how phony and mannered the actors tend to feel. But in this film it works. In the same way Depp’s bizarre, nonhuman take on Whitey Bulger works despite not being too different from what he’s done in the past, these two performances work despite the fact that on paper they should be all wrong.

As John Connolly, a corrupt federal agent, raised in the projects alongside the Bulger brothers, Edgerton often flails his arms about, shouts, swaggers, and chews over every line. It’s almost overacting. But it’s not, because what the audience is actually seeing is Agent Connolly performing. He begins the movie in a fairly subdued way, but once Connolly strikes a diabolical bargain with South Boston’s top crook, and justifies it to his FBI supervisors by saying he’s helping “take down the Mafia,” the agent winds up “performing” the role of the strutting, tough guy hero cop, the kind you’d see on Starsky and Hutch or S.W.A.T. back in the ’70s.  In the end, Edgerton brings the part back to subtlety, and Connolly begins to witness the web of deception he wove fall apart.

Similarly, Cumberbatch is very, very mannered as Whitey’s younger brother Bill Bulger, an influential and respected state politician. His motions are very stiff, and his Boston accent seems to emanate from him in the same way country songs emanate from animatronic bears at Disneyland. But this, too, works, because Bill Bulger is extremely fake in that peculiar politician’s way; so fake, he probably could no longer tell himself what he really believes and what says he believes. And while I spent the first half of the movie unable to see how Depp’s Whitey and Cumberbatch’s Billy could possibly be brothers, a scene late in the film where the senator stares down another character with Whitey’s unblinking intensity was very convincing indeed.

Nearly every character in Black Mass is engaged in a betrayal of some sort, professional, personal, whatever — the very nature of organized crime, as this film would have us believe, is that betrayal is both unavoidable and unendurable. The supporting players all manage to tap into this quality — I think Rory Cochrane is particularly effective, in a very understated way, as Whitey’s right hand man Steve Flemmi, whose growing disgust and disillusionment with his “friend” is revealed almost entirely through glances and gestures. Other standouts include Juno Temple in a one-scene cameo as an airheaded prostitute, Jesse Plemons (with a black mullet, beer belly, and a Matt Damon accent) as loyal bodyguard/enforcer Kevin Weeks, and Peter Sarsgaard as a squirrelly, coke-sniffing lowlife who ends up way over his head. Oh, squirrelly coke-sniffing lowlifes: where would gangster movies be without you?

Now, onto the direction. This is not Diet Scorsese, unlike, for instance, David O. Russell’s glib, smug chuckle American Hustle. Folks who tell you this is slavish Scorsese imitation are merely displaying the limits of their filmgoing vocabulary. No, this is a different animal altogether. Cooper’s style here is heavy on long static shots, especially close ups — this is far from the kinetic, frenetic hypercontinuity of Scorsese’s gangland films, even if there’s a tiny bit of influence here and there (it would be impossible not to have some). Cooper wisely avoids wallpapering the movie with needle-drop oldies hits, instead using a mostly orchestral score by Dutch composer Junkie XL, giving the film more of a horror movie feel than that of a Goodfellas knock off. And Cooper sharply uses silence and quietude in key scenes, a welcome relief from usually chronic noise seen in mob flicks. Still, filmmakers need to find a better way of showing the operating of a drug ring rather than just showing a guy in a car receiving a duffel bag full of money from a guy who is not in a car. Maybe one day…

Does everything about Black Mass land? Not exactly. One section of the film, where Whitey Bulger goes from being the top hoodlum in one neighborhood to being an international criminal, doesn’t quite convince you of the scope of his operations (can one really control such an empire from what appears to be three blocks in South Boston?) and the story fades to its conclusion rather than climaxing — which is essentially how the story of James Bulger really did turn out.

But Black Mass moves along at a surprisingly perfect rate; the film is willing to take its time in some scenes to let moments play out in their entirety while still managing to tell its decades-spanning story in only two minutes north of two hours.

What is most impressive, and most desirable, about Black Mass is how much it manages to not feel derivative, despite the obvious antecedents, and all the elements that make Black Mass as strong as it is — Depp’s performance, the muted direction of Scott Cooper, and the film’s unsentimental portrait of betrayal — make it, if not 100% original, then distinctive, powerful, and well worth witnessing.