Anyone interested in recent crime fiction is probably familiar with the work of Dennis Lehane, who wrote the novels Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone, along with several episodes of everyone’s favorite show, The Wire. The Drop is his first original screenplay, and the script attracted a top-notch cast: Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace, James Gandolfini (in his last role), and the increasingly ubiquitous Ann Dowd, in a tiny but fun role as Gandolfini’s sister.

It is a very small story about people involved in Brooklyn’s unglamorous underbelly. The titular “drop” is a reference to the city’s criminals that use a different bar every night to store their illicit cash, to always stay one-step ahead of the cops. But we don’t learn much about this mythical cash pipeline, beyond meeting the Chechen crime lord who controls it all and the bar workers Bob (Hardy) and Marv (Gandolfini) who help orchestrate their end of it.

It’s the kind of movie that tries to bring you into a whole rich world through just one character’s perspective. The problem is, the character is Bob, and Bob is a mute dullard. The film is largely an effort to find out why Bob is such a mute dullard. The risk is that the film takes on the characteristics of its protagonist, and it does for large stretches.

Fortunately, others mix things up a bit, particularly the “villain,” Eric Deeds (Matthias Schoenaerts, one of the more menacing screen presences in recent memory). Schoenaerts has a tough role, since the film hinges on him posing as a viable threat to the imposing Tom Hardy (Bane from The Dark Knight Rising), a challenge which he more than meets. If the Joker is introduced into the new Ben Affleck Batman universe, Schoenarts should be at the top of the list to play him.

Deeds is the ex-boyfriend of Nadia (Noomi Rapace), a damaged loner who bonds with Bob over an abandoned pit bull that Bob finds in her garbage. As it turns out, Deeds left the pit bull there as something of a twisted cry for help to Nadia, as one more anti-social act in a history of abusing her.

The core of the film is Bob and Nadia’s tentative relationship. Each is closed off from the world around them, but they both seem intent on trying to start fresh. Nadia is recovering from her presumably insane relationship with Deeds, but what is Bob recovering from? We don’t find out until the end, and the reveal is mostly worth it. Even in the soggy, frigid unhip parts of Brooklyn, where keeping to yourself is a way of life, love is possible, provided you find someone equally damaged.

Lehane has said that the script came from a short story he wrote several years ago. He worked on beefing it up to support a feature length film, especially Marv’s role, once Gandolfini signed on. Yet it feels like a modest short story that was inflated out to a nearly two-hour running time. This tension is somewhat palpable throughout.

The Drop is all about its twisty ending, a reversal of everything established in the early going, and where the main characters actually come to life.