‘Light Sleeper’ (R)

"Light Sleeper" works to the beat of a slow metronome -- but a deliberate one. It's marking steady time before an emotional explosion rocks this story of upscale coke merchants and yuppie addicts. This is a Paul Schrader movie, and in his dramas, no one gets away without murder or bloodshed.

In the Armani-suited, Thai-food-nibbling drug market in Manhattan, dealer Willem Dafoe rides a limo from customer to customer, bearing overpriced powder and pills. "White drugs for white people," he calls it. For Dafoe, a recovering addict, it's the perfect profession. He's even developed a friendly bedside manner with the kooks, eccentrics and Eurotrash he serves.

So when his boss, Susan Sarandon, announces her intention to segue from narcotics to cosmetics, his world is in danger. Hopelessly dependent on his job, with only half-baked aspirations to go into the music business, Dafoe realizes drug dealing has no retirement plan. A believer in fate, he feels something ominous coming his way. He senses his luck has run out.

The tension builds with understated deliberation. Dafoe runs into old flame Dana Delany, who has been clean for four years, and who doesn't want to remember the bad or good times. The murder of a young, uptown woman, apparently to do with a drug transaction, has made the tabloids. The police are searching high and low for suspects. Dafoe swears he is being followed . . .

"Sleeper" is wonderful, vintage fare from the man who scripted "Taxi Driver" and "Raging Bull," and directed his own screenplays for "American Gigolo," "Mishima" and others. It's melancholy and murky, involving and yet distancing -- arranged in the ascetic style of Schrader's idol, French director Robert Bresson. It is also full of Schrader's religious obsessions.

"The idea of God presupposes the existence of God," waxes one of Dafoe's stoned clients. "That's the ontological argument."

With the moody expertise of cinematographer Ed Lachman, Schrader traces Dafoe's personal odyssey in this nighttime cityscape of neon blues, suspicious faces and omnipresent rain. And imbuing the proceedings with memorable, sepulchral doom and gloom is offscreen composer/performer Michael Been.

"It feels," Been sings over the soundtrack -- and throughout the movie -- "like the world is on fire."

Little in this movie makes real sense; and characters (particularly Dafoe and Delany) seem to bump regularly into each other. But there's something transcendentally appealing between the lines. This is a film to be savored for its nuances rather than its story. Much of the film's effect comes from the prune-skinned, horse-toothed beauty of Dafoe. A well-dressed lost boy in the big city, he is often amazing to watch. We return frequently to shots of him sitting in the back of the limousine on his eternal deliveries. The city lights striate his face. His driver sits wordless and expressionless in the foreground. That rueful music from Been floods your ears. If that stuff doesn't give you a high, nothing else in this movie will.