Robin Williams in Boulevard (Starz Digital Media)

Robin Williams’s last role, in the bleak yet engrossing Boulevard, is unlike any other dramatic turn in his vast filmography. It is neither a minimalist thriller like One Hour Photo or Insomnia, nor a hyper-stylized depiction of mental illness like Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King. His performance most closely resembles his Oscar-winning role as psychologist Sean Maguire in Good Will Hunting.

As Dr. Maguire, Williams portrayed a man who lost his beloved wife to cancer many years ago and carried that grief with him, along with his traumatic Vietnam War experiences. In Boulevard, Williams plays Nolan Mack, a 60-year-old closeted bank employee. Both wistful characters ooze the sense that life has passed them by and the resignation to merely keep existing. But Dr. Maguire was wrung out from an overabundance of intense experiences, while Nolan was hollowed out from an utter lack of genuine ones.

He has worked nearly 25 years in the same strip mall bank and spends his days sitting at his desk on the open floor of the bank next to the teller queues; visiting his decrepit, bigoted father in a nursing home; and hanging out with his longtime wife, Joy (Kathy Baker). The Macks have a nice but modest house, no kids, and sleep in separate bedrooms. On Joy’s bed are crossword puzzles and novels to fill the time, and Nolan’s bedroom is fairly blank. He hasn’t developed many interests beyond slogging to work, dutifully taking care of his ancient father, and being a reliable friend for his wife.

Williams imbues a profound stiffness and discomfort. Nolan seems so uncomfortable with his body, he wears a T-shirt under his pajamas, and one imagines he showers in a raincoat. Nolan’s face is pinched into a fundamental unpleasantness, and his lips have almost vanished, leaving his mouth just a slit. His body seems about to collapse in on itself, as if he wants to negate himself entirely with each step. Expecting nothing from life for so long takes a sharp physical toll.

Routinely driving down the boulevard from the nursing home to his house, Nolan has been steadily suppressing the impulse to stop by the male prostitutes clustered on the corner. One night, he finally allows himself to act on his urges and clumsily invites a hustler, Leo (Roberto Aguire), into his Mercedes. Thus begins a fascinating, often hard to watch relationship between the two, as they are both equally inexperienced in any kind of emotional intimacy. Leo is accustomed to immediate, vacant sexual transactions in lieu of intimacy, and Nolan simply wants the chance to talk and breathe openly as a gay man, if even for a few moments.

As Nolan pins all his hopes for living an honest life on one very unstable, young, drug-addicted prostitute, the infatuation grows harder to control and to fit into his neat, predictable life. Nolan had never felt a genuine romantic connection with a man before, and despite his age, goes through something of a middle school emotional roller coaster of possessiveness and obsession, intermixed with a kind of fatherly protectiveness befitting the age difference.

What’s difficult to watch is that with every bit of positive self-actualizing Nolan makes, he hurts his wife. There’s also little real happiness to be found, even when Nolan does the right thing. Luckily, Bob Odenkirk pops up as Nolan’s best friend Winston, adding vital, if not outright comic relief and a sense of comfort in one’s skin and with his thoughts and opinions, unlike the closed-off Nolan. Beyond the merits of his performance, Williams is a fantastic scene partner for Odenkirk, Baker, and Aguire, elevating them to do some of the best work of their careers.

Suffused throughout with an unrelenting melancholy, Boulevard will stay with you after it ends. While at the outset one may feel melancholic that it is Robin Williams’s last on-screen performance before his death, Boulevard is such a stark, powerful work that you will likely leave the theater thinking entirely about the character, not the artist. And that’s what art is all about.