Verdict: Flawed but formidable.

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Everywhere you look in Spike Lee's "The 25th Hour," there's good acting. That's probably because everywhere you look, there are good actors — Edward Norton, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Barry Pepper, Rosario Dawson, and others.

The trouble lies in the connective tissue, which doesn't always hold these excellent performances together.

Lee carries a lot of baggage with movie audiences. He can be insufferably strident and self-indulgent; witness his bombastic "Bamboozled." But he's also one of the most ambitious, exciting and talented filmmakers of his generation. Only Lee would mourn a post-9/11 Manhattan in such a dynamic manner.

Strictly speaking, "The 25th Hour," which was adapted by David Benioff from his pre-Sept. 11 novel, is about the last 24 hours of freedom in the life of Monty Brogan (Norton), a middle-class, midlevel drug dealer facing a seven-year stretch in prison. Yet it's also about a city bowed but unbroken by an atrocity unimaginable on Sept. 10, 2001.

The opening credits are strobed by mysterious soft blue lights that finally are revealed as the evanescent Twin Towers of Light, which briefly infused the New York skyline with hope and resilience. Later, a lengthy conversation between Monty's best buddies — Jacob (Hoffman), a shy schoolteacher, and Francis (Pepper), a self-satisfied stockbroker — takes place in Francis' downtown apartment, with ground zero as a gaping-wound backdrop. Just as Monty has to find a way to face his 25th hour and beyond, so New York City must find a way to face this year and the next and beyond.

Monty spends most of his last day tying up loose ends. There's his dog, a mangy mongrel he rescued after it was burned and left for dead, who needs a new home. There's peace to be made with his father (Brian Cox), who runs a fine Irish bar catering to firefighters (more 9/11 iconography).

There's a final meeting with his Russian bosses, who play hard and rough. And there's the nagging question: Who ratted him out? Was it, as Jacob and Francis believe, his live-in girlfriend, Naturelle (Dawson), whose street smarts and supple beauty hint at betrayal?

In the movie's best scene, Monty spews a New York rhapsody of hate, attacking everyone from the "sheik" cabdrivers who don't know where they're going to the screaming queens in Chelsea to the Upper East Side X-rays, whose idea of a bad day is missing the sale at Bergdorf's, to the Koreans who've never bothered to learn anything but pidgin English. His soliloquy has the anger and artistry of an Eminem rap.

The picture bogs down during an extended party at a hip late-night club, where everyone drinks too much, talks too much and does things they really shouldn't. The sequence has a woozy incoherence, which is certainly intended, but it saps the movie's energy.

Then, however, Lee pulls it all back together with a jaw-dropping, life-affirming finale that whirls around Cox's heartbreaking sentiment: "This came so close to not happening." (You'll understand better when you see the movie.)

Which you should see, despite its flaws. "The 25th Hour" may not have staying power, but it has sticking power. You'll occasionally drop out of the film, but you'll never forget seeing it. All in all, not a bad trade-off.