Compelling performance underscores disturbing 'You Were Never Really There'

“You Were Never Really Here” - ★ ★

Joaquin Phoenix assumes a hooded, bearlike presence in “You Were Never Really Here,” a disquieting urban thriller directed by Lynne Ramsay. As Joe, a taciturn hit man whose specialty is rescuing young women who have been abducted and forced into sex trafficking, Phoenix is a skulking bundle of anxieties and retributive obsession, a dangerous mash-up of Holden Caulfield's beneficent alter ego in “The Catcher in the Rye” and “Taxi Driver's” haunted Travis Bickle.

In fact, “You Were Never Really Here,” adapted from a 2013 novel by Jonathan Ames, owes more than a passing debt to “Taxi Driver,” with which it shares an unsettling depiction of unresolved trauma, urban claustrophobia and male redemption predicated on female suffering. Ramsay makes bold, counterintuitive choices as a director, offering quiet interludes and quick, shardlike flashbacks by way of characterization.

That approach dispenses with the usual windy expository passages that bog down so many movies, trusting the audience to piece together the broken fragments of Joe's past life. The result is a drama that conveys an exceptionally vivid sense of impending dread.

“You Were Never Really Here” breaks cinematic storytelling down to its fundamentals: It's a study in sound, image and performance in which brutal violence is displayed obliquely and in which Jonny Greenwood's purposefully oppressive musical score often fights with Phoenix's unintelligible dialogue, as well as the assaultive sound effects of modern life.

Playing both protagonist and muse, Phoenix offers his bulked-out body as yet another canvas for clues to Joe's anguished past. The austerely pulled-back hair, the tattoos and scars, the private rites and rituals and bouts of explosive violence all suggest a primal unhealed wound and — when Joe is given the assignment to save the young daughter of a powerful politician — ultimate salvation.

As beautiful and compelling as Ramsay's filmmaking and Phoenix's performance are, the degree to which viewers will buy “You Were Never Really Here” depends on the degree to which they accept yet another display of febrile vigilante brutality motivated by sexual violence perpetrated against young girls.

There's no denying Ramsay's artistry in “You Were Never Really Here,” which, like her 2011 film “We Need to Talk About Kevin” qualifies as a brilliant exercise in formalism and deeply psychological portraiture. Still, there's also no escaping the fact that she has marshaled her gifts in service to a played-out story drenched in pseudo-angsty-macho wish-fulfillment fantasies.

“You Were Never Really Here” is a good film, maybe even a great one. But I can't honestly say that I liked it.

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Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Ekaterina Samsonsov

Directed by: Lynne Ramsay

Other: An Amazon Studios release. Rated R for violence, language and nudity. At Chicago's River East and Century Centre and Evanston's Century. 89 minutes