Keane's Damian Lewis does schizophrenia--and does it pretty damn well (Photo: Magnolia Pictures)

Ten minutes into Lodge Kerrigan's latest film, Keane, a distracting phrase came to mind: "impossibly great." It is the type of comment you hear thrown around in criticism and conversation but never really think about what it means. Does it describe work that is better than it could possibly be? Or does it achieve greatness that does not really exist? In either context, it rings kind of hollow, hyperbolic, histrionic. It is praise without definition, which is hardly praise at all.

But with Keane in mind, I experienced some new (at least for me) conception of what an impossibly great film could be. In short, this type of film defies your expectations while you are watching it. Kerrigan has a history of taking his audiences on such singular rides (static-addled schizophrenia in Clean, Shaven; bleak sexual psychodrama in Claire Dolan) that a viewer's early inclination to prejudge Keane as a simple wallow in intensity-for-intensity's-sake is not necessarily all that unfair. John Foster's camera confines actor Damian Lewis to one strained close-up after another as his mentally-ill title character roams New York in search of a daughter who may have been abducted—or may not have been, assuming he has a daughter at all. By the time Lewis collapsed for rest on a New Jersey roadside—barely minutes into the narrative—I had officially begun worrying that Keane would outpace and exhaust my ability to stay with all 93 minutes of its single-minded pursuit.

Which, of course, is really neither here nor there in critical terms; in fact, it probably reveals little besides my own weakness. However, Keane's exquisite dynamics slowly and stunningly reveal something more: a director's control, an actor's range and the simmering complexity of a mystery that never quite unravels.

"There are certain critical decisions all along the way," Kerrigan told The Reeler this week. "You know, there aren't that many, but they're really do-or-die decisions. I just tried to step out of the way. I focused on not making the wrong decisions, but I really just stepped out of the way. (Keane) had its own life. You could see it, you could feel it. It was like it had the right energy. And I didn't necessarily create that. I must have added something to it, but I didn't create it. I just recognized it. All I did was try to guide it a little bit—try to help it on its way, but it had its own force. And Damian was a huge part of that."

As the troubled William Keane, Lewis propels the film from pathos to terror and back again while hunting down the young daughter he claims was kidnapped at Port Authority Bus Terminal. If we are to believe the story he outlines early on for a pair of hapless ticket sellers, Keane has been on the case for six months: haunting the terminal and its immediate surroundings, pecking at detritus reminiscent of his little girl, hypothesizing and reconstructing routes along which an abductor could have pried her away. As much a mystery as his daughter's disappearance, Keane's madness sharpens in the crypt of a flophouse where his disability check affords him residency, beer and cocaine. His indulgence in violent outbursts and manic, unprotected sex reflects not only his desperation to escape, but also his warped sense of justice—he really does believe he has a bead on his daughter's kidnapper, and failing her return, he is not above simply conceiving another.

Keane's hyperventilating turbulence flattens out when he encounters the destitute Lynn (Amy Ryan) and her 7-year-old daughter Kira (Abigail Breslin) battling for traction with the hotel's desk clerk. Keane offers Lynn $100 to get situated, then enters the pair's lives as something of the friendly neighbor down the hall, ascending even to guardian status when Lynn travels upstate to square things with Kira's father. You can see where this is going. But Kerrigan never succumbs to playing up or even hinting at Keane's threat, a tribute to his creative growth in the 11 years since breaking through with that other disturbed-dad-seeks-girl film, Clean, Shaven. That film's Peter endured successive, noisy bouts of schizophrenia in his quest to find his own daughter, but plied the more overt mystery of whether or not he would include her in his own self-destruction. Keane instead chooses to magnify issues of guilt, grief and parenthood through the prism (rather than the experience) of severe mental illness.

As such, Keane's motivations have as much potential for good as ill. And Kerrigan has crafted such a complex character and aesthetic—and such an unwavering faith in his audience to digest that complexity—that the film's nuances totally outstrip the more contrived dangers of his previous efforts. "It's banal to reduce everything to one causal effect in life," Kerrigan told me. "The reason why people do things is incredibly complicated, based on years and years of decision-making. Yet in filmmaking, there is this desire among certain segments of audiences and critics to reduce everything to a banal explanation. 'Oh, this is the reason something happened; this is the one event in [his] life that really defined this person.' You know what? That's not true. None of us are defined by one event and none of us make decisions based on one event in our life. How we all deal with a crisis is different based on who we are as people and what we've experienced.

"So on the one hand, I shy away from these oversimplistic explanations, but on the other hand, I feel like I really am providing a psychological insight, but through behavior. I'm more interested now as a filmmaker to examine people's behavior and what they do rather than just explain it through dialogue for an audience."

You could kind of anticipate this standard while watching Kerrigan's 1998 misfire Claire Dolan, of which a bloodless script and performances missed clearing the jump between formalistic melodrama and tense character study. Naturalism is the order of the day this time around, from Keane's discomfiting Port Authority stresses to his and Lynn's slow, tender after-dinner dance about two-thirds of the way into his (and our) ordeal.

The ever-chipper Lodge Kerrigan at last year's New York Film Festival

Kerrigan insists that Keane is as rigorously structured as each of his previous works; it is just that Foster's handheld camera and lingering close-ups (all of the film's scenes unfold in single takes) evoke the lack of control that plagues its main character—not dissimilar to the wrenching sound design Kerrigan strung through Clean, Shaven, I guess, but so much less intrusive as an aesthetic device (Keane, incidentally, has no score or sound effects). "Every reaction—when to go to one character or another—is all planned," Kerrigan said. "It's all specific. John and I would work it out and say, 'It should go here and here.' And we'd rehearse and rehearse and rehearse and then we'd shoot the scene. We'd rehearse both camera and performance at the same time." Foster's camerawork indeed ranks among the year's great technical achievements; his fluid pans and unerring sense of proximity indicate as deep an understanding of the characters and the script as that attained by Kerrigan's cast.

That said, Keane is Lewis' film. He reels and steams and shudders and inhabits William Keane so entirely and fearlessly that his loneliness pervades even the teeming terminal of Port Authority. Part of the film's impossible greatness is that prior to viewing it, you would hesitate to believe a narrative's primary action could take place inside its main character's head—rarely verbalized, shivering in the pallid glow of his eyes. His Keane searches for his daughter in everything and everyone, but avoids the ham-fisted trappings of obsession. After all, he acts out of deference to his condition, and during a recent rehearsal break in London, Lewis told The Reeler that really knowing the condition symbolizes Keane's essence.

"It's difficult because there is nothing wrong with just representing mental illness accurately," Lewis said. "But sometimes in art, you need to find a different manifestation of it, because it's ground that's so well-trodden. To be honest with you, I'm delighted that Lodge and I have avoided the cliches, but at the same time, I was really just trying to be as accurate and as honest as possible. It was just an absolute determination to get it right and be accurate, and I suppose that if you are that specific, any cliched moments might have a new authenticity to them. They'll ring true again for the viewer, and feel fresh or new-minted to people watching because you commit to it with such a degree of honesty. Perhaps that's the way around it. I'm not sure."

Yeah, well, I am. Lewis' value is such that his status as Kerrigan's benefactor or beneficiary is tough to ascertain; Lewis credits Kerrigan's script, while Kerrigan claims Lewis deserves an Oscar nod for "one of the hands-down great performances I've seen." In the end—with Lewis' only full-face close-up and a resolution teetering between peace and total emotional chaos—you will not have a lot of time to think about either. You will, however, wonder if you are to believe what you just saw. But I am here to tell you—it is anything but impossible.