‘You Were Never Really Here’ a career peak for Lynne Ramsay, Joaquin Phoenix

Twenty-seven years ago, Gus Van Sant captured something delicately fierce about River Phoenix as he tricked on Portland streets in My Own Private Idaho. Lynne Ramsay does the same with his younger brother Joaquin, but in You Were Never Really Here the delicacy has been burned away. A hit man and all purpose fixer, Joe (Phoenix) has much to be fierce about. A New York state senator hires the Iraq War vet, still reeling with PTST, to find his abducted daughter. The chain reaction of events produces bloodier resolutions than Joe or the audience expects, thanks to Ramsay’s control over the material. By the time the credits for You Were Never Really Here have rolled, you’ll know you’ve something.

Aided substantially by Jonny Greenwood’s as-obtrusive-as-possible score, Ramsay (Morvern Callar, We Need to Talk About Kevin) shows a talent for exteriorizing the warped psychology of her lead character that also shows little regard for genre requirements. Big showdowns for which the audience is primed she throws away. Small moments meanwhile bear the arc of the universe. Often she and cameraman Thomas Townend let Phoenix’s punched-up, doughy face fill every corner of the screen like Orson Welles did his own Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil, to similar ends: underestimate these clumsy men at your peril.

Ramsay also waves aside exposition, which I suspect she kept to tantalize rather than to explain (the film is based on a novel by Jonathan Ames). When You Were Never Really Here opens, Joe has wrapped his face in plastic wrap. A child cowers in the corner. Are the events related? It matters until it doesn’t. His only tie is to an ailing mother (Judith Roberts). If she knows why he carries hundred-dollar bills in his pocket Ramsay won’t divulge, but Joe’s casual “Mom, I’m home” after a job in Cincinnati is a small joke, his mom’s watching Psycho on television an obvious one. Once he gets the mission from Senator Albert Votto (Tim Manette), he tracks daughter Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov) to a Manhattan brownstone that, judging from the various states of unclothing, may be the hub for underage prostitution. Wielding nothing else but a roll of duct tape and a cheapo hammer, Joe rescues her; his determination would scare the wings off Thor’s helmet. But cops — no big reveal, just a glimpse of their uniforms and shiny nameplates — track them down to a motel and attempt to kill Joe and re-capture Nina. A few minutes earlier Joe and his young charge have learned from local news that Votto has killed himself. Perhaps Governor Williams (Alessandro Nivola) is involved.

Reminiscent of buggy seventies conspiracy films like The Conversation, which also hinted at machinations several rungs up the power structure and as obliquely glimpsed by the audience as they are directly experienced by the characters, You Were Never Really Here  backs away from overt sympathy for Joe. The save-the-child plot thread, reminiscent of yet another seventies classic I won’t name, is less icky than it sounds. Ramsay writes no bonding moments; only a shard of a flashback to young Joe’s abused past suggests a motivation. I can think of only one sequence that threw me out of the picture. Burying a certain important character in a river upstate, Joe imagines sinking with this Lady of Shallot, hair tossed by the opaque water — it’s too damn lyrical for Ramsay, and I didn’t believe Joe, despite a febrile imagination, would dream such a scenario.

Phoenix, who won Best Actor at Cannes in 2017 for this performance, continues a run of astonishments. The actor has no vanity; he puts on a pair of boot cut jeans, a sweatshirt that probably smells like it was bought in 1923, and becomes these small, squirrelly, tortured men (literally in this case). If a friend praises him as the best actor working in America, I wouldn’t argue. A moment in the last act makes it clear: sitting in a diner dreaming of his own death a phantasm of something unknown flickers in Joe’s eyes for a couple seconds at most. I don’t know how you fake that synthesis of role and actor.

But it’s Ramsay’s film, and Phoenix just lives in it, hence the quiet joke of a title. Steven Soderbergh was the last director who in The Limey took a hacksaw to material this fraught with embarrassment, but that film had an air of swank anomie. You Were Never Really There is less reluctant about violence even when Ramsay is better at suggesting than showing it. I was in knots for much of my screening, yet I didn’t get a sense that Ramsay, unlike, say, Michael Haneke, wasn’t setting up scenes for the purpose of anticipating gruesome denouements later (the depiction of violence can be its own sentimentality too). Instead, savor the film’s topographical accuracy, its pungent details: a motel Bible used to put out a photo set on fire; a package of Birdseye frozen veggies as an ice pack (Joe’s world is one of corner groceries and hardware stores). Watch You Were Never Really There on a double bill with Zama, Lucrecia Martel’s equally demanding re-examination of myth.

GRADE:   A-