‘Last Exit to Brooklyn’ (R)

"Last Exit to Brooklyn," Uli Edel's lurid, grandiose adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr.'s controversial 1964 novel, takes place in a perpetual state of ashen gray malaise. Its setting is the early '50s in the waterfront area near Red Hook, Brooklyn, a world of closed-down storefronts and squalid dives, of striking factory workers, vamping transvestites, teen prostitutes and brutal punks.

For Selby, this nightbound universe was a dehumanized land's-end, the site where the world had collapsed in its own refuse. The pitch of Selby's book is close to hysterical, and the movie is doggedly faithful to its spirit, down to the last ruined life, the last bloodstained sidewalk. The feel that Edel has gone after is one of epic, hallucinatory bleakness. This is Brooklyn with an overlay of Wagner and Brecht, where sex, poverty, violence and drugs all mingle into a kind of feverish, teeming evil.

As a backdrop, this setting is as literary as Harry Hope's down-and-out saloon in "The Iceman Cometh." And as darkly pessimistic. The squalor of these empty streets isn't superficial, it's soul-deep. The film's depiction of human motives is relentlessly despairing; everyone is either a victim or a brute, sometimes both.

Harry (Stephen Lang), the steward in charge of the local union's strike office, is the main thread in this densely woven story. Because of the strike, Harry has become a figure of importance in the neighborhood, providing free beer and a rallying place for the out-of-work laborers. But there's a spooky turbulence in Harry's eyes. At home, he recoils with a mixture of fear and revulsion from his wife's touch, and the line between his lovemaking and his beatings is painfully thin.

At first it's hard to determine the exact nature of Harry's conflict. There's a hint in the way his gaze lingers on the slender-hipped Georgette (Alexis Arquette), a sensitive young man with Marlene Dietrich eyebrows and a mad crush on Vinnie (Peter Dobson), the area's hard-muscled hoodlum leader. But the full-blown force of his problem isn't revealed until he meets Regina (Zette), a floridly effeminate transvestite with whom Harry falls so deliriously in love that he is absent from his post on the morning that the factory bosses decide to run their trucks through the picket lines.

The strike's progress and Harry's deterioration run on parallel narrative tracks. Unfamiliar with power, Harry begins to abuse it, using the strike fund to pay for personal expenses -- including purchases of champagne and lingerie for Regina. In the meantime, the strike violence has escalated into open warfare. The confrontations between the angry strikers and the police, who line the cobbled streets on horseback, are rapturously photographed. Clearly Edel, whose best-known work before this was the German feature "Christiane F.," has a talent for large-scaled dynamism. In fact, "Last Exit" may be too overheated, too dynamic. Edel and screenwriter Desmond Nakano have re-created the churning muscularity of Selby's prose style, but the events of the novel seem garish and overscaled when depicted onscreen.

Working with cinematographer Stefan Czapsky, Edel has tried to construct a vision of working-class hell. What he comes closer to achieving, though, is a kind of malignant sensationalism. One horror falls hard on the heels of another and in such a rush that our feeling for the characters themselves is overwhelmed.

Wandering through the story of Harry's decline are smaller tales. In one, a shapely blond streetwalker named Tralala (Jennifer Jason Leigh) falls in love with a young soldier about to be shipped overseas and then, after his departure, proudly offers herself to the world. But when what seems like the whole world viciously takes her up on her offer, leaving her blood-splattered and unconscious, the violence of her degradation feels like gratuitous piling on.

Edel blunts the evil force of this tragedy by turning it into another detail in a parade of tragedies. Only a subplot involving a hairy-backed striker named Big Joe (Burt Young) who discovers that his daughter (Ricki Lake) is pregnant and arranges her wedding to the amiable and willing Tommy (John Costelloe), allows for the possibility of a moment's joy. After a point, it's too much.

Edel's rumbling style cries out to be taken seriously (as does Mark Knopfler's swooning, elegiac score). But the connections between the strike and the film's sexual material are never made clear, and thematically the movie remains mute. Edel gives us the grungy details of the atrocities without providing a context to give them relevance. In the end, the film's ugliness becomes ugliness for its own sake.