A shot of the underworld

The Drop has been noted for the final performance from the late James Gandolfini, and he and his character (a bar owner named Marv) are indeed among the strong points of this hard-bitten crime drama/character study. But it’s Marv’s younger cousin, a taciturn bartender named Bob Saginowski (an excellent Tom Hardy), who is the real and vital center of this character-driven tale adapted by author Dennis Leehane (Mystic River, Shutter Island) from one of his own short stories.

The title refers to the taverns and bars that racketeers use as temporary banks for a single night’s profits. Marv’s bar, which he no longer actually owns, is one such “drop,” and the fallout from his underworld dealings sparks much of the drama that threatens to engulf Bob and several others.

Those others include a Chechen gangster (a suavely menacing Michael Aronov), a scruffily malicious grifter (Matthias Schoenaertes), a chummy Catholic police detective (John Ortiz) who tries to keep sly tabs on Bob, and a tough-minded working gal (Noomi Rapace) who bonds with Bob over a rescued pit bull pup. Each of these characters brings out something distinctive in Bob and, to a lesser extent, in Marv as well. And yet part of the special power and mystery of The Drop is that, even with these added perspectives, we don’t really have a full picture of who Bob is until the end, and maybe not even then.

Director Michaël R. Roskam, a Belgian making his first English-language feature, has his multinational cast (Hardy is British, Rapace and Schoenaertes are European) credibly tangle New Yorkese throughout. Hardy, a marvel of subtlety earlier this year in Locke, is even better here.