‘Last Exit to Brooklyn’ (R)

Of course, any movie can be reduced to a banal essence. "Gone With the Wind" could be about standing by your man, or making great clothes out of drapes. "Citizen Kane" could be about the enigma of personality or it could be telling you that, for a kid's birthday, you can't miss with a sled. But "Last Exit to Brooklyn," a gothic, broody saga about waterfront hookers, drunken soldiers and striking workers, holds up a pre-reduced, ridiculously dire message like a striker's placard. Despite delving into the darkest of worlds, it's as thematically light as a musical.

Life Sucks, the movie tells you. And Then You Die.

Actually, this one-dimensional underworld full of postwar, cardboard-cutout punks, queens, tarts and cops, often does seem like a B-movie musical ("Last Exit!"). But in this case, there's no redeeming song and dance. Watching the movie is like sitting through a production of "West Side Story" staged by a Soviet agitprop director, or by DC Comics, or by Dieter, the dour, German intellectual host of "Sprockets" on "Saturday Night Live."

The bathos-ridden bunk is German director Uli Edel's distorted view of America, as culled from Hubert Selby's 1964 novel, a bad-Beat collection of short stories set around a Brooklyn waterfront in the '50s. Edel, who supposedly fell in love with the novel as a Munich film student in the late '60s, has finally realized his adaptive dream. But for someone so devoted to the book, he (with screenwriter Desmond Nakano) ultimately betrays the novel's unrelenting brutality, its unshakably misanthropic point of view.

A morally scummy union organizer in the book, for instance, becomes a tragic worker-hero (Stephen Lang) in the movie. You don't need to go to Sunday school to know what it means when he meets his final comeuppance hanging arms outstretched on a wooden cross. A prostitute, who at one point in the book stomps a defenseless man in the face until he's bloody, becomes in the movie something akin to a whore with a heart of gold, who befriends a cute kid with a bike. Jennifer Jason Leigh, as the whore, happens to give the best performance in "Last Exit," but her efforts are nullified.

When Edel isn't heavy-handedly furthering the bleakness of Selby's novel, he's injecting it with hope, or making amateurishly arty conceits out of it. A penultimate, babies-are-the-future baptism seems more appropriate to "Cousins" and "Parenthood" than this film. A climactic scene involving angry, striking workers, scab truckers, tear-gas-toting policemen and the usual collection of sleazy company officials is staged as a gothic "Battleship Potemkin" rock-video sequence of blue light, fog machines and choreographed chaos.

It doesn't take reading the book to see through "Last Exit," to realize the movie isn't completely convinced of the dark vision it pretends to possess, or to nod ironically when one of its characters retorts to another, "This is getting rather sordid. Why don't we go?"