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The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, Blake tells us. In Bad Lieutenant, Abel Ferrara's new film, the road of excess leads to the Port Authority Bus Terminal off Times Square. The film is a fantasia of decomposition, a devil's parody of the Stations of the Cross as an NYC cop (Harvey Keitel) identified only by the allegorical moniker The Lieutenant--reduced, in the end credits, to LT--executes his itinerary of self-destruction.

He spends a lot of angry time in his car. The first such long take follows him and his two little sons on the way to school, as he ferociously berates them for letting their aunt hog the bathroom (this is one of the rare notes of home sounded in the film). The kids get out and Daddy does coke right by the school. This scene rhymes with the Lieutenant's final drive down from Spanish Harlem to Port Authority with two crackhead kids (same position in the car) whom he is, in a unique and hard-won moment of mercy, about to send to freedom and New Jersey instead of to prison--which is where they belong for raping a nun right on the altar and violating her as well with a crucifix, not to mention stealing a chalice full of hosts. The cop then drives to Madison Square Garden and his destiny, which we see in longshot with loose, random traffic a breaking up our view.

Between the two trips intervene--like, say, the Hell panels of Roger van der Weyden's Last Judgment--grotesque tableaux of the Lieutenant sampling a rich menu of sins. His "police activity" is an uninterrupted abuse of power: scoring coke, ripping off the black kids who have ripped off a Korean grocer. The coke is sex fuel: an orgy with two willing women is followed some time later by sexual degradation of two unwilling women--younger women, in another daddy's car, beside which LT stands masturbating in the rain. He is increasingly about arrogance and irresponsibility. His days--and the movie--are structured by a baseball playoff between the Mets and the L.A. Dodgers; he keeps upping his (anti-hometown) bet on the Dodgers until he winds up owing the Mob an impossible $120,000. Games 4-7 mark his decline, as radio talkshows about the game and live-TV airings of the game soundtrack the film. The Mets, starting down 0 games to 3, stage a miracle comeback and take the pennant, but their miracle is the Lieutenant's damnation. These are odds he cannot fix.*

But if the Mets doom the Lieutenant, there is always Jesus to tug in another direction. The case of the violated nun (Frankie Thom) reverberates throughout the drama. First, the rape takes place to the sound of Heavy Metal pounding; lipstick-red strobe lights blink excitingly on the altar as a blue plaster statue of the Blessed Virgin topples and the ravished sister's curvaceous leg is stroked. The rape is stylistically of a piece with the Lieutenant's coke/come sensibility. It might have occurred in his head; he might as well have been the rapist, as is further emphasized in the obscene rap song that blares while he approaches the nun's hospital room and eyeballs, from behind a curtain and with a look perfectly split between lust and compassion, her voluptuous nude body on a gurney.

The Lieutenant, officially a cynic about Catholicism, gets sucked into its iconography: He squats on a velvet Jesus while talking to the devout Hispanic mother of his nice dope dealer. Then he pops in on and is popped in the arm by his dreamy junkie girlfriend Magdalena (the movie's only named character, played by co-screenwriter and erstwhile "Ms. 45" Zoe Lund). Then, climactically, he writhes wailing and cursing on the church floor after the nun persists in her refusal to finger the rapists and a bleeding Jesus in a dirty loincloth beckons silently from the center aisle.

The Lieutenant, who had earlier boasted to one of his mafioso creditors that "no one can kill me, I'm blessed, I'm a fuckin' Catholic," addresses the Founder of Catholicism thusly: "You ratfuck, you fuck, you got somethin' you want to say to me?" In an epiphany of self-knowledge--which is also, given Ferrara's lurid style, a polychrome parody of a spiritual epiphany--he moans, "I'm sorry, I'm weak" and kisses Jesus's feet, only to have Jesus turn into a black woman (Minnie Gentry), who kindly returns the chalice because it is a "holy thing" and then inadvertently leads him to the rapists' crack den. There, outrageously (the whole fuckin' movie is a kind of outrage), the lines of his metabolism converge as he smokes crack with the rapists and watches the doors of his fate slam shut as the Mets win the last game on TV.

The movie has the abstract feel of a Passion Play, an Inferno. Already in King of New York's investigations of pleasure and violence there was a disembodied quality to the nocturnal slitherings and glidings of Ferrara's urban monsters. That medieval typicality is very evident in the grimly tenebrous Bad Lieutenant, where early ironies attendant upon the paradox of a corrupt cop yield to nervous squirming and nervous laughter. Ferrara likes to hold his camera (Ken Kelsch was the DP) unblinkingly on one seemingly endless tableau of degradation after another, until we realize the intent is penitential. The scene with the two young women in the car forced to humiliate themselves, in its maddening refusal to stop and in the Lieutenant's stuck-needle obscene repetitions, goes beyond naturalistic horror. It becomes a revelation of the emptiness, the void, that is sin, which wears the mask of pleasure but is actually death.

And yet Ferrara's art has finally, I think, no real religious dimension. There is masterful iconography but no actual spirituality. There is no redemption for the Lieutenant, whose freeing of the rapists seems exhaustion more than grace or even imitation of the nun's (itself overwritten and phony-sounding) act of grace. A ravaged nervous system is simply yielding to a stray impulse. There is no Purgatorio in Ferrara, only an infernal toilet. Harvey Keitel crying out in church echoes for a second Victor McLaglen in The Informer, but even Ford's sentimental religiosity is alien to Ferrara. He seems a frenziedly brooding diagnostician of pleasure--a kind of puritanical Russ Meyer.

Harvey Keitel takes us step by bloody step along the way of this guy's cross. Always angry, always unsatisfied by his many drugs, he yet lets us see the wreck of a decent man, in contrast to, say, De Niro's slime-from-the-getgo LaMotta in Raging Bull. It is a performance totally in the key of Method improv: the running faucet of profanity can seem barely scripted, and you wince and you cringe and you cry for an editor, but in the big picture the Method indulgence for once beautifully justifies itself. For the numbing verbal repetitiveness and the shameless, wild exposure of the full body and the full soul are finally like Jackson Pollock squiggles that mysteriously add up. Here they give us a soul in hell.

Keitel is coming into his own not only as an artist, but also as an enabling force in independent cinema. This is evidenced by his credit as co-producer of Reservoir Dogs, young Quentin Tarantino's acidly funny and formalistically playful take on the heist flick a la The Killing and The Asphalt Jungle. It was Keitel who, by Tarantino's testimony, changed Reservoir Dogs from a projected guerrilla-style, 16mm, black-and-white street flick performed by the director's friends to the richly acted, sharply shot film it is. The movie is rigidly, determinedly, even desperately (but never suffocatingly) stylized: the crooks dress in black and white like Fifties church ushers, call each other only by "color" names (Mr. Orange, etc.), and engage in vertiginous verbal cadenzas about such topics as tipping, prison sodomy, and "Get Christie Love." Seventies pop kitsch, as radio-DJed by laconic Steven Wright, runs throughout, often ironically. For example, a sadist (Michael Madsen) slashes a tied-up cop to the tune of "Stuck in the Middle with You."

Cunningly interspersed flashbacks fill in some (eccentrically chosen and by no means logically ordered) heist-preparation scenes. The movie's present tense is post-failed heist, and we see nothing of the heist itself--this is Tarantino's oblique and postmodern way. The flashbacks include one lying flashback-within-a-flashback, itself interrupted by the liar speaking in his own fake persona. The most emotionally powerful and most formally complex flashbacks concern the life of the crook who is an undercover cop (Tim Roth is superb). In the present tense, this cop/crook is bleeding from a gunshot wound stupidly incurred. In the course of the long and acrimonious aftermath of the botched--or rather betrayed--caper, this cop opens himself to the most decent of the crooks, Mr. White (Keitel). White grows fond of the possibly dying flic, and this fondness precipitates the dazzling four-way-parallelogram shootout that ends the movie. Except for a final, mysterious gunshot. A coup de grace? Tim Roth told me that only he and Harvey Keitel and Quentin Tarantino know what exactly happens at the end. Will a sequel clarify all?

Reservoir Dogs is in any case a grace note in Keitel's suddenly-summer career. His playing in this ensemble piece is quiet, compassionate, strong, and no less worthy than his under-the-bottom, unlimited, unmodified hang-out in Bad Lieutenant.

*Ferrara's playoff is imaginary, of course, and he has doctored some real baseball footage cleverly, but mistakes abound: The playoff is often called "the Series," games are played at night in LA while it's daylight in NY, etc. And alas, recent events undercut the movie's assumption that Dave Cone is forever a Met. Ferrara's imprecision here matters.

Donald Lyons works the mean streets of Midtown Manhattan for The Wall Street Journal and The New Criterion.