BY BOB STRAUSS>FILM CRITIC

"We Own the Night" is an epic emotional drama in the guise of a crime thriller. The cops-and-coke-dealers part of the story has several great, scary sequences and some very predictable plot developments.

But the film's most impressive and explosive moments are personal, between relatives or lovers who care deeply for one another but are just too set on taking their lives in opposing directions. There's a lot of violent tragedy here, but the movie's real strength lies in its charged, tortured and very well worked-out relationships.

Which, initially at least, are fairly joyful in a hedonistic kind of way. We're introduced to Joaquin Phoenix as a likable, fun-loving nightclub manager who calls himself Bobby Green. It's 1988, and he runs one of the hottest discos in Brooklyn for a grandfatherly Russian furrier who treats him like a son. Bobby's also got a superhot girlfriend, Amada Juarez (Eva Mendes) and lots of good, partying pals. Overall, the movie makes sex, drugs and out-of-date dance music (why they're still spinning Blondie and The Specials that late in the decade is a head-scratcher) look like all the fun they can be, and Bobby is as happy a host as anyone could want to know.

But he's hiding something. His last name is actually Grusinsky, and he comes from a family of Russian-American cops. Dad Burt (Robert Duvall) is, naturally, disappointed in and worried about his youngest son. His straight-arrow brother Joe (Mark Wahlberg) just got promoted and wants Bob to help him nail some Russian drug dealers who are working out of his club. Bobby wants nothing to do with any of this, but as unpleasant truths become evident to him, blood proves thicker than vodka.

Then things really get hairy.

Writer-director James Gray, for whom Phoenix and Wahlberg starred in "The Yards," brings disturbing visual ingenuity to such standard action scenes as a car chase and a dope factory raid. But his real interest clearly lies in characters, and the more stress they have to cope with, the better.

Phoenix goes all out, expertly running a wide gamut from charming stoned bliss through roiling resentment to wrenching grief, fear and regret. Mendes subtly but solidly layers Amada with conflicting feelings, building what we thought was a superficial disco doll into a fully faceted woman. Wahlberg has fewer scenes, but perhaps the deepest traumas to play out; though just as dedicated, this cop couldn't be more different from the one he just played in "The Departed."

Of course, Duvall is reliably on-the-money in every shot, and a variety of Eastern European actors fit their mostly menacing roles to a T. Sure, some aspects of "We Own the Night" are pat or hard to swallow, and the film often seems grim just for grimness' sake. But this really is a case in which superb acting and strong, surprising staging provide more than enough pleasures to balance the books.

E-mail: Bob Strauss, (818) 713-3670

WE OWN THE NIGHT
>R: violence, nudity, sex, drug use, language.
>Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Wahlberg, Eva Mendes, Robert Duvall.
>Director: James Gray.
>Running time: 1 hr. 57 min.
>Playing: Citywide.
>In a nutshell: Some great acting and stunning suspense sequences elevate this so-so tale about a police family's complex relationship with Russian mobsters in 1980s New York.