But it lacks momentum, and thus the propulsion required to rocket it into the movie mythosphere. Its choppy editing hurts. An orchestral musical score rather than its jukebox soundtrack might have helped unify its ping-pong narrative. This is not a mob opera, it's a pop procedural.
Inspired by "The Return of Superfly," Mark Jacobson's incredible-but-true magazine profile of the '70s Harlem kingpin, Gangster opposes two types: Lucas, outlaw and devoted family man, versus Roberts, lawman and unfaithful husband.
Put them in the same room - which doesn't happen until the film's climax - and they are brothers under the holster. Half moral, half immoral, all monomaniac.
Scott's film opens with a chilling glimpse of the stone-faced Lucas incinerating a rival thug, then pumping him with bullets - the hit-man equivalent of wearing both belt and suspenders.
American Gangster details how Lucas went from henchman to overlord of the Harlem underworld, less good at showing what drove him. The real-life Lucas boasted to Jacobson that he had the business brain for Wall Street, but couldn't have gotten hired as a janitor there.
Like self-made men before and since, Lucas applied his entrepreneurial skills to the supply-and-demand of the street. He buys heroin direct from the poppy fields of Asia, controls the means of transport, packaging and distribution. He cut out the middleman, boosted his profits, and - in the most daring part of the scheme - smuggled in the contraband on U.S. military jets.
As Lucas, Washington streams like a torpedo splintering the hull of society. When he says "My man!", it's an expletive. Both he and Ruby Dee, as his mother, give Oscar-caliber performances.
